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4.8 Grow your links regularly and at a natural speed

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I already made a mention of this before, when talking about link farms — remember? But here it is again:

Grow your links at the right pace.

Let's think: normally sites do not get thousands of backlinks overnight. It doesn't happen that often that crowds of people all of a sudden put links to you, all within a day or two. As this doesn't look natural, Google may pretty well frown on this.

All right, you may think But why do these link farms still exist, maybe it's not that bad at all? Hm... read what happened with my friend's website. He was selling snowmaking equipment. The competition there isn't severe and after doing simple on-page optimization and arranging a couple of links he easily got a #5 place in Google for the keyphrase snow blowing machine. Sure, he wished to get higher — and he went to those link farms. Mitch got about half a million links one day, and some hundred thousand more next day. I mean, he practically got them all at once. And — instead of the higher rank he expected he got... what do you think? Lowered in ranking? Not that simple. Totally dropped from top 10 results — for quite a long time! Sure this was a bad lesson.

Therefore, do NOT get thousands of links pointing to your website all at once. If you do this, you are asking search engines for trouble. Better increase the number of your backlinks gradually. For instance, raise the number of backlinks you get slowly but surely, by 50 to 100 links a week. This helps you stay in the clear and build your links the natural way.

Moreover, it's better to be getting links regularly, without long breaks. For instance, it's better to get 300 links each week than 3,000 links today, and then nothing for the whole month.

4.9 Look where the link can be placed

Links can sit on different pages of a website, and this makes surprisingly big difference for how profitable a link is. Let's talk about this.

Sitewide link

Some sites will place a link to you on each page of the site — and this link is called sitewide. As a rule this link will look the same on each page and will be sitting on the same place of each page.

Example of a sitewide link
Example of a sitewide link (the same link sitting on different pages of a website)

A sitewide link has good potential to bring you traffic — as it can be found on every page, the same user will see the same link numbers of times. Sure, this makes bigger chances that sooner or later, the link will get a click.

And sitewide links can bring huge SEO value — if someone puts a link to you (presumably naturally and free) on all of their site's pages — this means the site owner trusts you a lot. So Google will also trust you much.

When I say sitewides bring huge SEO value, I mean it. And the thing is, sitewide links are so weighty that it's hard to get them for free. They often get sold. So when you're thinking of getting a sitewide link, be ready you'll most likely need to pay for it.

Still here's the flip side of the coin: if Search Engines assume that your sitewide link is paid — they might not take it into account when deciding where to rank you.

So with sitewides, you should be careful. By the way, if you're getting them for traffic only, then you can use the rel="nofollow" attribute in the links.

I believe you may be getting a sitewide link for SEO, too, and it may look suspicious to Search Engines. To stay safe, sometimes it's good to find a site that recently put sitewide links to someone else. I mean, if you see that some person has a sitewide link and is OK with it — why not get one from the same site as well?

Link from a homepage

You can get a link from a site's homepage, that is, from the main page of the site (URLs of these pages end with the domain name — .com, .org — or .de etc.), for instance www.somesite.com

A link from a homepage has a lot of value, too, and it'll hardly look suspicious to Search Engines (like sitewide links do). If you have an inbound link from a PageRank 5 homepage, this is a big add up to your rankings — and looks quite natural.

Link from an inner page

A link can also stand on an inner page — any page deeper than a site's homepage.

Its URL looks like this:
http://www.mysite.com/innerpage.html

or like this...
http://website.example.org/so_many_pages/here_we_go.htm

A link from a deeper page is not so valuable as, say, a link from a homepage. But if a homepage has a PageRank of 6, part of this will definitely pass to the inner page that's linking to you — and in turn, you'll also get part of its high rank.

Moreover, some inner pages rank very high themselves — so they can be really good. And, as links from deeper pages are not tremendously weighty, you will get these much easier than links from homepages or sitewide links. So don't waive the idea of getting links from inner pages.

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