Web Blog of Greg Mathews

There was once a time when FFA (Free for all) pages appeared to be a good way to increase the number of links pointing to your site and hence increase your sites traffic.

Then you had link exchanges, these again appear to be great but as with FFA’s joining a link exchange can have the wrong effects.

That is now no longer the case, Search engines frown upon such sites and can ‘punish’ your site when it comes to indexing your site.

A new method of gaining traffic is called link baiting but after reading this post on the Google ‘Webmaster Central’ Blog I would not be surpised if this is dealt with firmly by the search engines in due coarse.

Google recommend that you should think of the users experience rather than the search engines and links to your site should be placed on sites that are relative to your site, ie simular subject etc. This does make sense to a point in my opinion, if a person is looking for a widget, they are more likey to follow a link, to your site selling widgets, from a widget manufacturers site.

The problem as I see it, is that your widget may be unique, it may be something you manufacture and sell, who is then going to link to your site? someone else who is manufacturing and selling the same type of widget on your site? I don’t think so.

Everyone needs to know, Link Popularity does effect the search engine results, you need to get it right, ensure your site has good internal links to other pages on your site, beleive it or not it does help. Make sure if you use javascript navigation that you also have normal html links somewhere as many of the bots that crawl your site do not read/understand javascript and hence will not detect the links within it.