Research help- SEM!!!!!!!!!

[JamieWillsher]

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Hi,

I am aware that the number of inbound links to your site is important for SEO reasons, however is it purely the number that has an effect or is there more to know surrounding this subject.

If anyone could point me in the direction of any relevant articles or has some words of wisdom i would appreciate it greatly.

Many thanks

[eskimo]

1) The more in-bound links (IBLs) to your site the better.

2) IBLs from quality important sites like the bbc are much more benefical than IBLs from small sites.

3) The anchor text of the IBL (the clickable text) is partly used by search engines to decide what the recieving page is about.

4) Be careful who you link to.

5) SE engines can show you which sites they have indexed, that are linking to you.

6) For IBL to have any effect on your sites ranking, they should be simple direct links.

7) The more IBL your pages have, the quicker they will be included in any SE updates.

[smn2]

Eskimo,

I'm particularly interested in the 'be careful who you link to' bit.
(Sorry to go a bit 'off topic', here.)

Did a little bit of research into so-called 'bad neighbourhoods',
and came up with these resources

http://www.rightscripts.com/
(Program to buy - Outbound Links Checker)

http://www.llandoselect.com
(Free, but no-one seems to be linking to this site.)

http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/
(Didn't find any bad links, but the free demo of
the Rightscripts program did.)

Anyone got any comments on these resources - an I wasting
my time, here - or any suggestions as how you can easily work
out if a site is a BAD SITE to link to (in terms of Google
penalization, etc.)?

Cheers,
Steve

[JamieWillsher]

How do you know who are 'bad sites'! If the penalty for linking to such sites is so severe then surely there must be a way of knowing or detecting the bad sites.

[eskimo]

Hi Guys,

I think it's quite rare for an 'honest' website to be seriously penalised for linking to a bad site. After all your site could have old links that were once pointing to good sites, which have since turned bad.

I think google uses it more to target sites which have numerous links to bad sites and is a repeat offender.

Usually if a site is already included in the google index, or has it's own page rank, then I assume it's safe to link to. In the majority of instances, you will be linking to sites because of a link exchange, and there is very little benefit in exchanging links with a site which doesn't already have Page Rank.

This is a snippet from Google's webmaster guidelines

Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."
Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

Those look like some interesting tools smnash. I use this free tool to keep tabs on my IBLs with the major search engines:

http://www.checkyourlinkpopularity.com