Link Authority
May 20th, 2007
There are two primary factors Google and other search engines modelled from Google consider when ranking websites:
The quantity and quality of websites that link in to your website.
This is also known as “link authority”. By quality, quality sites are basically websites that have high google page ranks; major corporations, trade groups, government organizations and especially .edu educational websites.
So the key is to get these websites to link to your website… but easier said than done.
Webmasters who rush at trying to get high quality sites linking into them find out just how difficult it is, so they tend to focus on quantity instead. Â
There is great risk in focusing on quanity of sites linking in. The risk is two fold. First, if you link back to low quality websites, particularly ones that have little to no page rank, or who have been banned or penalized by Google, then your website will also become penalized.
Second, even if you don’t link back to the website, just the fact they are linking to your website is enough to take a hit in your page rank.
Google basically takes a “guilty until proven innocent” approach about websites. They assume all websites are evil doing spammers trying to manipulate their page rank. Until your website convinces them otherwise, you’ll be hampered from ever getting to the top of search results.
If you have spammer and link farm websites linking to your site, this signals that perhaps your site is also a spamming link farm.
Another problem with exchanging links, is maybe one of the websites you exchange links with goes out of business and the domain is taken over by a spammer.. well now you are linking directly to a spam site without you even knowing it happened.
So in general, you have to be very careful in exchanging links with other websites. Focus on quality and forget about quantity… quantity is more likely to do you harm than good.
