The Importance of Links

If you're serious about promoting your website then you will have realized by now that after creating your website and optimizing it for your chosen keywords or phrased the MOST important thing you can do is to improve the number of incoming links to your website. After all the internet is supposed to be a web of interconnected sites.

Indexing systems such as Google also need some way of measuring the importance of your site on the internet and one of the ways to do this is to measure the number of incoming links to your site. Of course, what your really want are a large number of high-ranking sites (with PR [page rank] of 5 or better) with incoming links only to your site, but that's not really realistic.

Your incoming links, however are important. What you want are good incoming links as these (at least in terms of Google's latest algorithms) count the most count the most both in terms of giving your site good page ranking (PR) and in terms of getting your site deeply indexed. Reports coming from Google even indicate that if you don't have sufficient incoming links then though your site may be actively spidered it will not be thoroughly indexed. Indeed, I have fallen foul of this myself and have some anecdotal evidence to support this as a reality.

In putting up my main Nemeton: Home of the Celtic Gods site (along with its sub-sites of Nemeton: Home of Ancient Recipes and Celtnet Information web information site) I concentrated on putting-up good content and where possible writing tight code that would verify well. I did join a few web-rings to get initial traffic and after a few moths, as I wrote new content Google was finding and indexing the pages with the spiders coming about once a week. By March I had an adsense income of about $80 a month (not great, but pretty good after only three months in the program). Then in April the adsense money dried up...

I was desperate to find out what had happened and eventually when I went to the Google sitemaps page I found that my indexed pages had dropped by 90% and almost 75% of these were marked as 'supplemental' from August 2005 and would realistically never be found in any normal web search. It was horrible. Initially I thought this might be a 'blip' and I waited for a month but the situation did not improve. Desperately searching for whatever might be wrong I cleaned-up the sites, thinking that they might have been penalized by Google for whatever reason.

Then, finally I came across this posting on Matt Cutts' BLOG. It looks like my problems were all down to my inbound links (basically I had none). I'd taken a very 'white hat' approach to the whole web thing and having a good website I wanted my links to grow naturally. My desire was basically to have the site pay for all my internet and web hosting costs, which basically meant getting $70 a month, which I'd achieved. But the new Google indexing rules meant that I was in a bizarre catch-22 situation. Google wouldn't index my site unless I had enough inbound links and there was no way to naturally grow in-bound links unless my site was indexed — which is complete madness!

This was pretty much when I decided to join the remainder of the web world both in attempting to make as much money as I could from the website and in using any and all means possible to get good in-bound-links [IBLs]. Partly this started as an experiment to see whether it would work or not. First I started with web directories that offered free in-bound only links. But finding these sites and signing-up to them was proving to take an enormous amount of time. As I result I signed-up to the service offered by Seoster who submit a website to multiples of 100 directories for $10 per set. I opted for 200 submissions to see what would happen. Their service was quite fast and in just over a week I had my first confirmations of inclusions. A few days after that and the number of pages indexed in Google began to climb at a rate of about 5 pages every other day. A breakthrough!

Of course, these were all decent inbound-only links. Which fits with the proposition that in-bound links score better in Google's algorithms that reciprocal links. Though reciprocal links also count in terms of Google's indexing algorithm. As a direct result I decided to update the whole linking process at my site, designing a new PHP front-end and using a MySQL back-end which would allow users to automatically submit their sites to the index for either reciprocal links or paid uni-directional links. This led to the development of the CeltNet Links System.

Of course, I can't ever let a good thing go so I also extended this page to link through to a classifieds advertising page which offers both free and paid-for classified ads. I'm now in the process of adding as many links as possible (though, as recommended by Google I'm only allowing links that fit-in with the three themes of the website: Celtic, Web Information and Recipes. In a month I'll post again to let you know how this new approach is working for me.