How do you know which sites to link to?

From the very beginning Google's 'page rank' has been derived from the number of links coming into a given site. With Google's recent updates to it's algorithms this has become a matter of greater urgency for webmasters as the only way to be regularly crawled and indexed by Google is to have sufficient incoming links to your site. But these should not just be directed to your home page. You should also have links coming in to deeper sections and pages of your site — as many of these as you can in fact.

It's all well and good to say this but which sites should you seek to gain link exchanges from. Obviously you should avoid automated link exchange systems as these could get you penalized as belonging to a 'bad neighbourhood'. Apart from these the knee-jerk reaction is to say: go for websites with high PR (page rank) ie sites with PR of 4 or more. There are many sites out there that will tell you the page rank of a site or page. There are some link exchange sites that won't even accept links unless the page you're putting your link on has a PR of 4 or better.

The problem here is that the PR as calculated by Google is notoriously unreliable. It's only updated every three months and generally tends to underestimate the true PR of a site/page. Indeed, a quick check of some of my pages showed that Google was indicating about 10 incoming links and a PR of 3. In fact I have over 80 incoming links and the PR should have been at least 4!

If you can't trust PR then how do you make a decision about which pages and sites to try to link to and which to avoid? Below are some guidelines that you may want to think about when considering link partners:

1. The target website represents someone you'd want to be associated with. It may sound obvious, but think about the site you're attempting to link to. If they don't represent someone that you'd like to be associated with then don't go for a link exchange with them.

2. Make sure your target link is relevant. Again this is an issue that I've addressed before. Google is now checking incoming links to your site and if they're not deemed 'relevant' then you may be penalized.

3. Ensure that the website performs well on Google. As PR is not a reliable measure of a website's 'worth' you still need some measure of whether it's a good thing to link to a particular web page/site. One of the best ways to do this is to come up with a few relevent search terms then check how your target website performs in these searches. If the page consistently performs well in these searches then it's definitely worth linking to.

4. Your links on the target site should be accessible to search engines. In recent months a number of link sites have been using rather underhanded practices to hoard page rank. They've been garnering links to a page in their site but using the 'nofollow' tag they prevent the outgoing links from being spidered. Such links will not help your pages' rankings at all.

5. Try to get your links embeded in the body of the target website's copy This is a tip to maximize any traffic you're getting from your links. The truth is that if your link is part of the text then it will be clicked more often than it if was on a side-bar or at the very bottom of the page.

6. Ensure the target website allows you to use your own text The text that accompanies your website's description is a critical part of your marketing and branding. As a result you should only really link to websites that allow your to define your own description of your website.

7. The page on which the link sits shouldn't be too far away from the home page The general rule of thumb here is that search engines in general won't index very much that's more than three layers deeper than the home page. Essentially the first link to your website shouldn't be more than three clicks away from the site's home page (this is how the BBC organizes their site). If, say your link is three clicks away from the home page but a further click takes you to a detail page about your site then this is OK.

8. The target link links to specific content Many linking systems only want to link to your home page. However, you want the search engines to index as much of your site as possible. As a result you will want to have a number of link exchanges that are deep links into your website. This is most easily achieved by writing articles in which you embed your URL. However, if your website is divided into fairly obvious sectons (and your top-level directories link to your content) then you may be able to exchange such URLs with more focussed websites. A good example of this would be the brewing section of my website http://www.celtnet.org.uk/recipes/brewing/ which I've had considerable success exchanging links for.

Of course, almost no link exchanges will meet with all these criteria; just use your judgement about the ones that are most important for your needs. I wish you luck in you link exchanges.