Inbound Links

Google, MSN and Yahoo use inbound links as a major criteria to rank search query results. Just any inbound links won't do though.

What are inbound links?
Inbound links are links on external sites (not your own) that point to pages on your site. The search engines place great emphasis on these to rate your site. Of course, not just any inbound links will do. Search engines are looking for links to your site that seem natural. This means that someone links to a page on your site because they like your content, or your page is relevant to their page.

A link from another well regarded (by the search engines) will carry more weight than a link from an unrelated site. If your site is about printers, it is best to get links from computer related sites. If your site is about scrapbooking it is best to get links from a craft site. And so on and so forth. In other words, it is not necessary to get links from an identical site, but ones with related themes. It is still useful to get links from unrelated sites however the search engines will give less weight to them.

Age of links
Google has stated that they are now measuring the age of links. So the longer an inbound link stays on an external site, the more it will be trusted by search engines. So a link that is a month old will be less reliable (in the search engine's eyes) than a link that is one or two years old. This can fairly be said to negate bought links, which are typically sold on a month to month basis. To keep a paid link for several years would be cost prohibitive.

This 'aging delay' also discounts links to your site on scraper pages (pages produced by an automated script to assemble snippets from several sites and display them on one page purely for profit). Scraper sites are seen as a scourge by legitimate webmasters due to copyright issues and general business ethics.

The best inbound links remain on a high ranking originating page for several years and can become quite valuable.

Continue to Page 2: Anchor Text for Inbound Links