Link Building – All Links Are Not Equal
When considering search engine optimization (SEO), links are an incredibly important element of a successful campaign, but all links are not the same. Links are very important whether they are links within your own site, or links from other websites pointing to the various pages of your site. Search engines consider links when formulating their ranking algorithms. If a search engine’s spider does not follow a link, or cannot see a link, then it does not count as a link for SEO.
Determining the difference between good and bad links can be difficult to spot with the untrained eye. The reason: the links all accomplish the same basic task; they take you to a destination page. We will examine the differences between a few common links: normal, nofollow, redirect, javascript, and flash.
Normal HTML Links
To begin, let’s examine a normal link. The HTML code for a normal link would contain an opening and closing Tag with text or an image inside of it:
<a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com/page.html”>this text is a link</a>
This is the best kind of link to use because search engines precisely understand which page the link is pointing to, the page it’s pointing from, and the text contained within the link. These types of links pass along Google PageRank and add value to your SEO efforts.
Read the rest of the article on identifying links for link building
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2 Responses to “Link Building – All Links Are Not Equal”
By Listerate (2 comments.) on Feb 24, 2007 | Reply
Wow! Neat article. Thank you for the attention to detail. I always thought all links are pretty much the same.
By DNL (18 comments.) on Jan 15, 2008 | Reply
I think you forgot the image links and though I haven’t tested it yet, I read claims and reports that the ALT text is not as good as a link text, which makes sense to me.
Thank you for the article. I liked the one one JS links. Any experiments you’ve done with how JS links pass juice or not?
I’ve seen indexed pages linked with Onclick but I am not sure if they pass the same amount of “link juice”
Marius,