Prayagasoft - web designer India, Ecommerce developer india, Ecommerce design

New Linking Strategies

Making The Web A Better Place to Be

December 1, 2003 - Web Submission Services formally announces a change in their current linking strategies for existing and future clients.  This change is being made so that we can contribute to the well-being and future growth of the World Wide Web.

Over the course of the last several years, web masters, SEO's and and site owners have experienced a massive reciprocal link gold rush in an attempt to boost a web sites search engine rankings for important keyword phrases.  It all started with the {excellent} theory that if a web site has a lot of links pointing to it, it must be an important site and one that people would want to visit, therefore, it should be placed high in search results.  Though, the theory is a fabulous one, it also needed some tweaking as we have now found out, just a few years later, that this has caused a hysteria of link exchanges while web sites are becoming saturated with useless, often completely off topic, "links".

When the new link popularity age came along, I absolutely refused to have a standard "links" page on our own or any of our clients web sites.  I knew then as well as I know now, that valuable, outgoing links are important to our visitors but I also didn't like seeing all of those messy, uncategorized link pages.  Often linking to web sites that often did not remotely relate to the subject of the web site such as "Viagra" links on a "baby bedding" web site. 

Now, why on earth, would someone think that I might be interested in buying Viagra when I was visiting a "baby bedding" web site?

I had it in my mind that I refused to participate in these types of "link exchanges".  I found it much more useful to create full page articles about web sites that I felt were useful to my visitors or to incorporate useful information about web sites that I felt were important to my visitors, directly into the content of my web site.  This is demonstrated in some of our past articles , written as long as two years ago.

However, my unwillingness to change my attitude about "typical" link exchanges, didn't get us very far.  Very few sites shared or thought highly of our "article" idea's.  Client link popularity scores were not increasing but their competitors scores were.  Competing web pages, participating in this hysteria of "standard link exchanges" and even buying text advertisements on high quality web sites, were gaining top rankings quickly as our client web sites were taking several months of aggressive optimization tweaking before having a chance to compete with top ranking results.  Needless to say, clients became frustrated as they wanted to compete for top results quicker.

Because this "idea" of aggressive reciprocal linking definitely seemed to be working, because our clients wanted it and because the search engines seemed to endorse this method (by proving to everyone, month after month, that it worked without any attempt to stop it), we finally came around.  Although, we still made every attempt to keep our "link pages" neat, clean, organized and related to our general subject, we jumped on the typical link exchange bandwagon and rankings began to soar much quicker.

Today, it seems the bandwagon is finally starting to fall apart as search engines become more advanced.

As many of us know all too well, Google, the most important search engine of all, generating the most traffic (for us anyway), has recently undergone an extensive update, implementing new algorithms created to improve search results for their searchers.  Google is a terrific search engine, which took a lead over all of the other major search engines by providing the most accurate and relevant results for any particular search query.  Striving to remain the most popular search engine, Google continues to upgrade it's algorithms to eliminate spam, irrelevant and deceiving results.  This most recent updates proves to us all, just how powerful one search engine can be as many web sites completely lost their current rankings when they felt they had done nothing wrong.  In reality, they probably didn't do anything wrong and if they are dedicated to assisting search engines to provide the best possible search results, their web sites could quite possibly, achieve top rankings again, in the future.

Many web masters are still very angry and many web sites have taken a hard profit loss, just as the holiday season began.  Unfortunately, this was definitely a hard hit for many.  However, while it was hard for some, the update has been extremely positive for others who have increased their positions and for searchers who will continue to receive the most accurate results for their searches.  Personally, I feel that this change has been needed for a long time now.

No one knows just yet, with absolute certainty, exactly what changes were made to the algorithms.  There is still a lot of guessing and theories going around.  Researching for several hours over the last few weeks, I have found very few guesses or theories that I agree with after extensive analyzing.  However, there are some that I do agree with and some that I feel I can back up after extensive analyzing.

One popular theory takes me back to two years ago with my resistance at participating in "standard" link exchanges.  Some are saying that Google is beginning to place a lower level of importance on web sites that exchange links, just to exchange links.  Google wants to provide information, not pages of useless links.  This makes perfect sense to me, as I also, want to provide the best possible information to my visitors.

As of December 1, 2003 , we will revert back to our old ways.  Links will be provided to our visitors because they contain good, solid information, products and / or services. Links will be contained within a directory organized by specific topics relating to the main theme of the web site.  Links will contain solid information about a web site, company, products and services.

Even if this theory has nothing at all to do with the changes that Google has made, we feel that making some adjustments to a few of our strategies, including our linking strategies, will help to contribute to making the Web the best that it can be and encourage others to do the same