I have seen on many sites, usually on blogs, that there will be page on the site as the “links page” which is just a webpage full of outbound links. I imagine that the only reason a webmaster would have such a webpage is because he is getting exchange links in return on the “links page” of whoever he is exchanging links with.
These people probably think that they’re increasing their number of incoming links and as a result, their Google PR will increase, and their search engine rankings will increase.
This might have been true years ago, but there is no way I would still consider having a links page if I wanted to be friendly with Google. You might not know this, but link exchanges are against Google’s TOS. It’s as simple as that. You are breaking Google’s rules.
Even better than that, if you set up a links page then it is 100% obvious to Google what you are doing. It will take exactly 1 second for Google to verify that you are undergoing link exchanges and then you have the infamous “Google slap.”
Your site’s search engine rankings will now be non-existent. Your site will literally not come up in any search engines. So is it worth the risk? I beg to say not.
What’s the alternative? Contextual links are the alternative. That means linking from within your post to the website that you’d be exchanging with. If I have a site about building links and SEO, then I will have a link from within the actual post to the webpage that I want to link with.
Regarding Google, having links to your website is not nearly as important to having links to your specific web pages from other relevant web pages. The link to your website from a post will simply have much more effect than a simple links page addon.
In the end of the day, only natural linking will help your website. It is important to keep in mind that each URL is what Google is looking at when it ranks pages, and not the actual website.
Of course the website that the URL is attached to does have some significance i.e. domain worth, trust, authority, name, but in general it’s the URL that matters.
Keep in mind that regarding natural links, don’t be afraid to have outgoing links from your webpage. Natural links in a content filled post will never be looked down upon by Google.
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very interesting. I have an old site I did in school with a links page and was considering doing something similar on my site now but after this article…. Thanks for the info, I will be working more and more on links to posts and pages. Maybe that can be another post: “how google has come to rule our onlilne lives”
Great Point Donny, You always bring the the table valuable information that most people are aware of, or are not thinking about.
Thanks again,
Your point is absolutely correct. However, the other circumstance under which I might want a “links” page is because I genuinely want to offer some resources to my visitors. Usually these are links to a few reliable authority sites. I suppose I could put contextual links to those sites as well, but having a set of resources collected in one place might enhance the user experience. But if I were involved in link exchanges, I would agree with you 100%
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