Google Says - Linking and Finding
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Next once we have the pages built we need to have them placed on the internet and have them found by the search engines.
Google Says: Have other relevant sites link to yours.
Now the important factor here is relevant, links to your site should be related to your website in some way that is based on common sense, using our New Jersey pizza shop, linking the pizza shop to a Boise Idaho “slip and fall” law office would not make much sense to most of us, so the search spiders will not see this as a logical link but more of an attempt to influence rankings. Now if you were to link the pizza shop with a cardboard pizza box manufacturer or a pizza oven installer this would be reasonable and the spiders would see it that way as well.
Google Says: [0077] The dates that links appear can also be used to detect "spam," where owners of documents or their colleagues create links to their own document for the purpose of boosting the score assigned by a search engine. A typical, "legitimate" document attracts back links slowly. A large spike in the quantity of back links may signal a topical phenomenon (e.g., the CDC web site may develop many links quickly after an outbreak, such as SARS), or signal attempts to spam a search engine (to obtain a higher ranking and, thus, better placement in search results) by exchanging links, purchasing links, or gaining links from documents without editorial discretion on making links. Examples of documents that give links without editorial discretion include guest books, referrer logs, and "free for all" pages that let anyone add a link to a document.
Next there is the amount of links you want to build. Natural links take time to develop and the search engines know this. As such adding 100s of links per month is usually not seen as a good thing to the search spiders and usually results in a filter being applied to your website with lowered rankings.
I wrote about links and how I do not see much value in them in helping to attain front page results in the organic search results listings. Read the article for more information. And this still holds true. I have rarely built links for my clients, and because of this most of my clients have never suffered any sort of "google sandboxing" effect. Once the site is crawled and indexed, then links can be added in moderation.
Google Says: Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
What google is telling us here is that taking part in a reciprocal link exchange will be of little value and if it is intended to influence search rankings will earn you time in the corner so to speak. Others may link to you from poor quality websites and there is little you can do to stop this, however you do not have to link back, that is where the penalties come in when you take part in these schemes. Then you are a willing participant.
Google Says: Submit a sitemap as part of our Google Sitemaps (Beta) project. Google Sitemaps uses your sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your web pages.
This sitemap is different than the one you build for users. It is used to help Google crawl and index the world wide web in a more efficient manner, While Google states the use of Google Sitemaps does nothing to effect rankings, it has always been my thought that making Google's life easier is going to have some positive effect. Even if it is only good karma, it can't hurt like other things people try.
Google Says: Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.
This step is not needed if you build a link from a high-value and Google-friendly website. In fact there have been some who feel that allowing the search engine spiders to find your site on their own by crawling links is of more value to your web sites rankings.
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