Organic Link Building Revealed

Issue #4: Choosing Your Neighborhood Wisely, And Keeping Google Happy

Hi, how are you today? I'm doing great, thanks for asking. Today we're gonna talk about the importance of good neighborhood for the success of your link building efforts. We'll cover all those things you no doubt heard about, namely hub sites, authority sites, how not to get banned, and more... OK, let's get started.

—Dan

In Today's Issue:

***Choosing The Right Neighborhood For Your Site***
***Double-Dealing Sites You Should Stay Away From***
***Hub Sites And Authority Sites — What It's All About***

Choosing The Right Neighborhood For Your Site

As you no doubt remember from a previous issue, Google basically interprets a link as vote for the site it points to. Google also looks at who actually casts a vote by analyzing the page that links to your site. Another important thing to remember is this: Search engines rightly consider that while you can't control who links to you, you can control who you link to.

Why is this important? Because if you link to a bad neighborhood, you are voting for it. Which kinda makes you "bad", and entails a penalty on Google's part. While you don't need to worry about where your one-way links come from, if you're into link exchange, you should be very careful about who you link to.

There are some well-known guidelines on what sites you should generally avoid. This usually includes staying away from link farms, adult, pharmacy, online casino or gambling Websites, especially if they are not related to your site's theme. Although it's usually easy to get a link from such Websites, you shouldn't go for it unless you really know what you're doing. Because such sites are known to spam a lot, Google and other search engines will most likely devalue the links anyway, and penalize your site.

Unfortunately, simply following these guidelines will not guarantee your site will never be penalized for linking to bad neighborhood. That would be too easy.

Another good way to tell if a site you are about to link to is frowned upon is to look at PageRank and the link popularity of a site. Although PageRank can be manipulated, you can usually get a pretty good understanding of how trustworthy a specific page is. And by looking at how many links point to you link partner in search engines, you can also tell how good he is.

And the good news is, you don't have to do it by hand. LinkAssistant makes it easy for you to check your potential link partners' link popularities in all the major search engines such as Google, yahoo! and Bing, as well as to view their PageRank. LinkAssistant will also show you the Alexa Rank of your link partners so that you can get an estimate of how much traffic they're getting.

Double-Dealing Sites You Should Stay Away From

Some unscrupulous people just can't do without trying to use some dirty tricks with you after you exchange links with them. The idea is to place a link to your site, but not let the search engines see it and therefore use it when calculating your site's ranking. Unfortunately, things like that are getting more and more common, so you should always be on the lookout for link partners that might double-deal you.

Some of the most wide-spread dirty tricks people might use against you, include:

• Using the rel="nofollow" parameter inside hyperlink text. This essentially tells Google this link is not trusted, and should not be considered when calculating the ranking for the site it leads to.
• Using the "noindex" and/or "nofollow" HTML meta-tags. This effectively prevents a search engine spider from crawling specific pages.
• Using robots.txt to make search engines never visit certain pages.
• JavaScript-generated links that search engines can't follow.
• And many, many more...

Pay close attention to who you exchange links with. Sites that use dirty SEO tricks mentioned above are not only depriving you of the link popularity you deserve, the are simply being dishonest, and you don't want to do any business with them.

While it could be a real pain to try to tell the dishonest partners from the good ones, LinkAssistant could really lend you a hand here. Simply check your link partners for compliance, and LinkAssistant will instantly tell you if any of your link partners are relying on Black Hat SEO when linking to you.

Hub Sites And Authority Sites — What It's All About

Now that we've covered the bad neighborhoods, unscrupulous link partners, and how to deal with them, let's talk about something nice. I suggest we clear the confusion around some of the terms you probably heard, namely hub sites, trusted sites and authority sites, and discuss their importance for link building.

The idea behind hub and authority sites goes back to the HITS ("Hypertext Induced Topic Selection") algorithm — an algorithm used for rating and ranking pages. This algo uses two values for each page, specifically, the authority and the hub value. To put it in a nutshell, the more sites with high-quality content a site links to, the greater this site's hub value becomes, making it a better hub, or trusted site.

For example, search engines, especially Google, consider DMOZ (aka Open Directory Project) to be an excellent hub for many topics and themes. DMOZ is very much trusted because it's human-edited and takes content quality very seriously.

At the same time, a site's authority value depends on how many good hubs are linking to it. Sites with a higher authority value will generally outrank their competitors in many search engines, other things being equal, of course.

Obviously, getting a good incoming link from a good hub site could be very beneficial for your Website's rankings. But before you rush ahead looking for hub sites to get a link from and propel your site to the top in SERPs, let me remind you a good hub site is a related hub site.

OK, here's how you can use LinkAssistant when you find a good hub. Simply give LinkAssistant the URL of a good hub site, and let it harvest all the links from it. Since a hub sites links to good authority sites, you can exchange links with them and seriously improve your link popularity. To do that, simply point to Tools -> Find new link partners..., then select the Harvest URLs from a specific webpage, or scan a complete website option — and LinkAssistant will do the rest.

Well, that's it for today. I hope you've learned something new you can use in your daily SEO. Feel free to drop me an email at if you have any more questions.

If you missed the previous issue of Organic Link Building Revealed, you can grab it here. And don't miss the next one coming entitled "Staying Out Of Trouble And Leaving No Dirty Footprints Behind".

Best of luck optimizing your sites,
Dan Richmond
SEO Consultant
Link-Assistant.Com