Where to Get Links for Social Interaction

• Directories may link to sites you submit.

• You can exchange links with similar web sites. If you can afford to, it is better to create legitimate business partnerships and friendships rather than just link exchange with whoever is willing.

• Writing articles about your topic and placing them on other web sites can give you inbound links via the article signature. If you submit articles to other sites, you may want to create unique content just for the article submission sites or have a longer or slightly different version of the article on your site so that you are not fighting against duplicate content issues when others syndicate your articles.

• Writing press releases can give you inbound links.

• You can participate in forums which provide signature links. If you participate in communities and leave relevant, useful comments then eventually people may want to link to you if they start to like you.

• Buy links or rent advertising space.

• Donate to charities for links.

• People interested in your site may eventually link to you without you asking. Generally, this is where SEO battles are either won or lost in competitive markets.

Generally, the easier and cheaper the link is to get, the less a search engine will want to trust it. Getting other people to want to talk about you or your business (and link to you) is the golden egg of SEO.

Search engines want to count legitimate editorial citations. They would prefer not to count other types of links as votes. Some engines, such as Google, have advanced algorithms to find and discount some artificial links.

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Why Buying Links is NOT a Good SEO Practice

Link building is not an easy task for SEO’s that its sounds easy to hear. But one truth is that so many SEO’s give promise that they will get thousands of link in several days; but this link mostly they buy from other sites. Of course buying links will get you number of good amount of links faster than natural link building. But in reality this is not a good idea because Google considers buying links in order to pass/get page rank to be a link scheme. According to Google “Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.”

This is also true that Google wouldn’t penalize your site if it does not find out that you have been buying links to get your page rank up. Eric Enge, who explained why he doesn’t buy links, wrote a good entry on how Google can find out that you have been buying/selling links.

For those who do buy/sell links but for only for advertising purposes you shouldn’t really worry since Google considers this as a valid reason. You should make sure that the links are properly designated as links for advertising only  by…

• Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute; or
  
• Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file
  

If you have been buying links as part of your link building campaign or has been doing so for your clients this is a good time to rethink your strategy.

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How does google calculate the Page Rank??

Google calculate the page rank of your website by counting each incoming link to your site as a vote. For example, if www.site3.com has an outgoing link to www.site4.com; Google considers the link as a vote for www.site4.com. It’s like if you were commending a reputable company to ur friend- your recommendation strengthens his confidence in that company. 

But Google doesn't rely on the pure count of the links coming to the site in order to calculate the pagerank. The search engine robots analyze the page linking to your site as well. The more relevant the linking page is to the keywords entered, the higher the importance that Google gives to your pages. So, keep this in mind when you are thinking about getting one way links to your site, or organize reciprocal links. 

When analyzing the linking page, Google takes into account the following on-page and off page factors:

• The Page Rank of the link page.
  
• Whether the linking page is on-focus or off-focus. If you have a medical website, an on focus link would be a link from another medical website. A link from a site about Pictures would be considered off-focus. 
  
• The number of outgoing links on the outgoing link page. A page with 500 outgoing links will not be considered as relevant as a page with only 20 outgoing links.
  
• The quality of the incoming links directed at the website of the outgoing link.
  

So, the quantity and quality of links pointing back to your website are the major part of the Google algorithm to calculate the page rank. 

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