experience

Link websites are those sites that provide links to the pages of your own. Typically, the links are submitted manually and reviewed before being published and if the site is of a good quality then you can enjoy a positive boost to your link profile and your search results. However, Google and other search results do have stringent guidelines that they use to determine the quality of a link and the benefit that it will therefore bring to your marketing efforts.

Good link websites include web directories and social bookmarking sites. These require you to manually submit information. Directories will usually have a review process and should be well categorised, which helps ensure that you enjoy page targeting as well. Social bookmarking websites enable you to benefit from the surge in popularity of social media websites.

Bad link websites include spam sites and link farms as well as, to some extent, paid link sites. Paid links are a real bone of contention in the SEO industry but Google’s take on them is that if a website buys a link to benefit from the passing of PageRank from one site to another then they contravene their own webmaster guidelines and standards. As such, these are usually best avoided too, unless they use a nofollow attribute.