Unique Original Articles » Link Factors Series- External Links

No one would argue the importance of external links when it comes to searcdh engine algorithms and rankings. In fact 71% of respondents to a seomoz.com survey believe it holds very high importance when it comes to search engine rankings.



SEO search engines consider links to be “votes” for your website. The better the quality of the links and the higher the number of links to your website the greater the chances are that your website will rank on the first two or three pages of search results for related keywords.



It is important for you to understand that not all links count for SEO purposes and that not all links rank equally. So, how can you determine whether or not a link is going to have an SEO value and is there a way to know for sure which links don’t count?



If you are trying to create a of link building or online advertising campaign, these are important questions to ask and get clear, definitive answers to. You don’t want to waste time building worthless links that will have little or no impact. You need to know which links have the greatest effect on your SEO rankings so you can maximize the return on your investment.





Links that count toward SEO Rankings all possess two traits:



1. The link must be hard coded in HTML. The link should use a format like < a href=”http://www.site.com” >. If it does the link becomes fair game for ranking. Google is beginning to count Javascript links but HTML is still the preference.

2. The page that the link is embedded into must also be indexed in Google. A link can only pass value if Google knows about it. You can check whether or not a page is indexed by using the “site:” operator in the Google search box followed by the URL in question. It is important to remember that new pages usually take at least a few days to be crawled and indexed.



These are the two conditions that a link must meet in order to pass SEO link value criteria although these two conditions do not guarantee a link will pass value.



What does that mean? Here are some technical exceptions that lead to a link NOT counting in the eyes of Google.



1. If there is a Nofollow tag Google will ignore the link and will not pass any value from the link.

The nofollow tag is commonly used in the comments section of many blog platforms because it prevents spamming. It is also required by Google on any advertisements or links that are paid for.

2. Robots nofollow tag

Similar to the nofollow tag, the meta robots nofollow tag which is found in the header of a page, results in all links on that page to be nofollowed. You can check for any nofollows on links by using the SEO for Firefox tool.



3. Redirect links

Any time a link goes through an intermediary page to track ad clicks or sales or to put up a disclaimer page, the link will not pass value to the resulting page unless a 301 permanent redirect is used. Use the Check Server Headers Tool to check for the redirect type.



4. Javascript links

Javascript links were invisible to the search engines for a long time. Google has begun crawling Javascript links but there is still debate over whether or not links that use the onClick event (to construct the destination URL) pass value. The safest thing to do is to use HTML links whenever possible. If you were previously using Javascript to hide advertisement links from the search engines, use HTML and nofollow instead.



Do make sure that the site you link to is a trusted site and shows up in the first several pages of search results. Age of the domain and the page a link sits on in particular is a major piece in the link value puzzle. Google and other search engines give more weight to links coming from old trusted domains and web pages that have been around for sometime.



If Google trusts a page and considers it important, it will crawl and index the page quickly and often. If the cache date of the page your links are on is over a month old, that’s a sign Google doesn’t trust that page and as a result, links do not pass any value.



There is a way to check if your link is passing SEO value but it’s not always easy. What you have to do is create a link on the target location with unique anchor text. For example, on our travel webpage, we could create a link in the content saying “ vacation properties”. This is an obscure but related term to what we do. Then, we go to Google and type that phrase in the search bar. If our page comes up in the search results containing that keyphrase, the process worked.




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