Lammo.net: Affiliate Marketing Blog

It’s great that people have become search engine savvy. More and more people are wising up and starting to focus on link building to increase the ranking of their sites and benefit from the traffic and profits that should follow. The “world wide web” is just that, a tangled network of websites which should and must be linked together. However, the wave of near desperation to gain links, wherever they’re from, shows that many have really missed the point.

More links = higher ranking, right?

People are starting to realise it’s a bit more complicated than that.

Links to and from a site benefit that site in several ways. First things first, search engines can get to your site through any incoming links, just the same as any website user. Secondly, search engines are a bit like librarians. They like to understand where sites belong in the grand scheme of things. The sites linking to and linked to by any website work as a kind of “bibliography”, letting the likes of Google know what the subject area of your site is. Those links, both outgoing and incoming help to define the quality of your site. Links from sites that are already recognised as “good sites”, with their own high rankings will positively affect your own site’s rankings and are usually seen as more valuable than those from other, lower ranked sites. But here is where we start to hit problems. People get all carried away with gaining links from other high rank sites without thinking about how relevant that particular link is to their site or even to that particular area of their site.

Deep linking is basically linking TO (and indeed FROM) content within a site, rather than just linking to the homepage of a site or offering links from a links page, directory or resources section. These links can direct people to a page or even an image, the idea being that the link goes to the most relevant material. Search engines prefer links in content to homepage and links pages links because of this theoretical relevance. Now clearly many sites don’t have the ability to link FROM within content pages and are forced to offer links from links pages or directories. Despite the current mythology surrounding reciprocal linking, there is plenty of evidence that such links are still of value, assuming that the site is relevant and that your link isn’t number 9,451 out of 10,000. However, as search engine algorithms continue to evolve, getting smarter and smarter by the day, everyone else really needs to smarten up too.

The basic problem is that in their desperation to please search engines, websites are forgetting that they are meant to be used by real people, to whom relevance and context are all important and random lists of links are utterly meaningless. Unfortunately for them, Google and chums are increasingly attempting to index and “think” like a real person in their algorithms. Links that go directly to a site’s interior pages are much easier to use and make more sense to a human because, unlike generic links, they relate to what that person wants to do or read. If you’ve followed a link to go to a site that might have relevant content and the link takes you to the site homepage, you then have the job of navigating your way through that site to find the juicy bit of content you were actually looking for. Would you bother? Many wouldn’t. In this sense, deep linking is analogous to the debate surrounding affiliate links. Therein sadly the two depart as most affiliate tracking links have no value as link equity.

So, Why not make life even easier for search engines and users alike? Use contextual links, links that are buried within relevant content on your site — or at least grouped together on the most relevant page. If you were reading something, you’d want to know where to get other useful information about that topic. When would you want that information? While you were reading it. Not on a separate links page later, where the links may or may not be grouped by topic area and will definitely not have any information about their specific relevance. Same goes for search engines. They value the high quality content surrounding your link and the content on the page that your site links to.

Of course, all this talk of “high quality content”, context and relevance will make some people shudder. Who has the time to do this nowadays? Well, it’s looking more and more as though those who do will be at the top of the search engine league tables. As search engines increasingly become just another user in disguise, those sites who try to get by on easy quick win links will find those links’ value decrease. Of course no algorithm is perfect and people will continue to find ways round the system. Think of it as an investment for the future. By changing over to a link in content sooner rather than later, it will make life easier in the long run as search engines become more and more “human” in the way they think.

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