Obsessed by optimisation and link popularity

Let's say it once for all: we cannot rely exclusively on search engine optimisation and trading links. Although it is perfectly acceptable (and expected) to do a cursory amount of SEO, many website owners do too much to the detriment of their sites. The purpose of your website is to offer information and possibly a service to clients and visitors. Your SEO activities should not define how you develop, structure, and word your website.

Problems with trading links

The most popular technique in search engine optimization currently is link trading. Knowing that Google judges a page's value by the number of inbound links, website owners learned that they could set up entire links pages and exchange links with hundreds of other website owners.

You will know the websites that do this. They will have a page named "links" or "resources" that contains a myriad of links to other websites. If you visit those other websites, they typically will have a similar page.

The problem with exchanging links is two-fold.

The first, and more important one, is the fact that link exchanging does not have as strong an effect as it once had. Google knows that webmasters exchange links, and many webmasters are concerned primarily about the quantity of links they have.

Google also knows that these links are primarily exchanged in an attempt to increase page rank, something Google probably will try to not recognize.

Page rank was initially developed to incorporate the number of natural inbound links a website had. So, to prevent website owners from falsely increasing their page rank, Google actively works on developing systems that determine links that are a part of a link exchange and links that occur naturally.

The first problem with link exchanges is this: website owners are spending way too much time on an activity that has relatively little impact when they could be spending their time writing articles or other more reliable traffic generation techniques.

The second problem with exchanging links is the cosmetic effect it has on your website. Visitors that come to your website do not want to see a loosely collected arrangement of links to sites that may or may not be similar to your topic. They came to your website to see what you have to offer.

If you want to recommend a resource to your visitors, you can do so, but you certainly would not do so with a links page. The cosmetic effect that links pages have on a website is to make it look less professional. SEO should not dictate how your site is arranged, worded, or how you spend the majority of your time.

For more information see also

• promotion techniques
• trading links
• content is king
• Google page rank

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