Link request – Easy Guide to safe links

by Greg Tomkins

No one doubts how effective good content is to your website. It is not only of value to your visitors but other websites will seek you out looking for sites to link to or from or to which they can set up RSS feeds

Be wary of link farms – services who offer to attract 1000’s of free links to your website. Most of these deeply “black hat” techniques which will result in your website being penalised or black listed by the search engines.

While there are many who are understandably wary of link requests they receive, it is suggested that you do not avoid these altogether. If used correctly, link requests can produce very powerful results and considerably enhance your web site optimisation. Search engines place significant importance on the quality and number of links you have into and out from your website. These links impact your search engine ranking and PR score.

The following are however offered as simple to follow guidelines to assist your link building program.You should not be off handed to your handling of requests you get from web administrators seeking a link to you or you linking to them.

1. Check to ascertain if the site is diluted by a multitude of outgoing links and few inbound links. This is particularly important if the outgoing links are unrelated to the site’s own content.

2. Check the relevance of the site’s content and theme to your own internet site. Unsuitable links do you no favours with the SEs.

3. Don’t consent to any request unless you have proved the website’s current details and its history. What is being displayed at the domain now may be quite different to what a former owner of the domain had on the web site.

4. Be careful with requests received from any link farming web services that is free. If you wish to these types of services, be sure to pay the subscription and then rigourously apply filters carefully to the sources of any request.

5. Be careful with requests received from any link farming web services that is free. If you wish to these types of services, be sure to pay the subscription and then rigourously apply filters carefully to the sources of any request.

6. Ascertain whether the outgoing links have the NOFOLLOW tage. If they do then you’ll get restricted value (if any) by the search engines for such links.

Be prepared for the long haul. Backlink building is not a quick fix solution to optimising your web site. The results will come and they will be rewarding but it will take time. If you are not interested or do not have the time to do this yourself, some SEO specialists provide this service as an addition to their usual SEO services.

Owners of well ranked websites will receive many requests for backlinks each day and as such you need to submit your request in a way that will attract their attention. The best advice would be to ensure you personalise you request and where ever possible address you request to a real person. Get hold of the person’s real name and personal email address. If you can not find it on the website itself, then do some research to locate these details

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