Playing the link game

It’s no secret that your site’s ranking will be significantly improved the more links that exist on the web pointing back to you - but not just any links will do…

When the page rank technology that Google uses to rank search results became public knowledge, many inexperienced webmasters thought they had found a quick-fix solution to achieve top rankings (regardless of the content quality on their site) by building dodgy link farms.

A link farm is basically a site which has no useful information but exists merely to house a bunch of hyperlinks to various sites. By designing programs to build many of these link farms a user could create thousands of active links on the web that pointed back to their site.

Fortunately this practice is now considered an abuse of the internet and search engines have been proactive about discovering link farms and punishing sites that use them by removing their listing from search results altogether.

So there is no overnight method for giving your site a #1 search result - and you should be suspicious of anyone who promises one.

There are a few things you can do to legitimately make a site more accessible for search engines however, if you’re interested check out our entry on ‘The basics of search optimisation‘.