Text Links

There’s a lot of talk by many SEO consultants about themed text links and how they are the ONLY text links a webmaster should be seeking. Some go as far as to state un-themed links are worthless in the search for high Google rankings!

What’s a Themed Text Link?

First we must decide what a themed link is and this causes a major problem!

I know a site about home furnishings is related to a website about kitchen accessories (related meaning the same visitors might like to see both sites), but does Google? How can Google match content that doesn’t use similar content/keywords!

This is a series of SEO advice and tips aimed at new SEO consultants or those looking to learn SEO from scratch. As the owner of SEO Gold I ensure all our SEO consultants understand the importance of links to good search engine listings.

Importance of Text Links

If you are familiar with Google search engine optimisation you’ll already know text links are essential to gaining even slightly competitive SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). You may have come across reference to Googlebombs such as the Miserable Failure SERP which shows the power of text links with specific anchor text**.

With reciprocal linking you as an SEO consultant (or web site owner) have more control over the quality and quantity of the text links obtained. Unfortunately if you are starting with a low PR site finding quality reciprocal link partners is practically impossible.

Every low quality website owner and their dog seems to be the main users of reciprocal linking rather than the sort of websites you want links from.

If you’ve owned a site for more than a week you’ve had the emails “Saw your great site and thought you’d like to reciprocal link, blah, blah, blah… you sell shoes and we sell Viagra, perfect match don’t ya think” You look at the site and find your link will be part of a large directory and your link is 10 clicks from the home page on a PR0 page (wonderful, sign me up!).

Interesting title don’t you think

No I’ve not lost the plot, all will become clear as you read.

The World of Warcraft

Recently I’ve become a little addicted to the Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) The World of Warcraft (WOW).

My eldest son (15 years old) is to blame, he wanted to try the game out to make some money, so I bought the game and paid for a 6 month subscription, but after I played it I was hooked (it’s so addictive)!!

Now we have two World of Warcraft accounts!

Originally he planned to sell WOW gold (apparently a big industry, but against the terms of playing WOW), but changed his mind and settled on creating the site Warcraft World which is primarily a list of World of Warcraft Quest Guides.

There’s a large group of Internet users called bloggers, they spend many hours a day both reading and writing diary like web sites called weblogs or blogs.

I (actually my business) own a lot of blogs, they generate a lot of links from other bloggers who find your type of writing/content interesting. If you lack a talent for writing don’t worry, you can always do image blogs like this Picture Blog until you find a niche.

So far the images on that blog are from a cheap digital camera, all are taken by myself or my family (wife and three young lads). If we keep adding new images it will generate links, we can then link from that site to other sites that make money.

Was looking through the newsgroup alt.internet.search-engines which used to be a great resource

Anyway, a new poster asked an excellent question regarding linking to non-cached pages (from the newsgroup thread “Re: should I reject non-cached sites?” edited version):

I run a modest linking scheme on my website and have always had a policy that we would only link to sites that are cached in Google. I’m not so fussy about PageRank at the moment as our link pages are not all ranked.

I’ve had a number of link requests from sites that look pretty well set up but the link page is not cached in Google.

Please note if you plan to buy text links despite the inherent risks we recommend using Text Links Ads (click the image below) for all your text links needs.

They are better than the rest we’ve looked at.

A couple of months back I decided my SEO company should try selling text links via one of the text link brokers who list webmasters inventory in a searchable format allowing a potential purchaser of text links to find relevant sites. Basically saves us time dealing with site owners looking to add links to our sites (takes quite a lot of time!!).

Submit your site to many directories such as DMOZ. IF (and it’s a big if) your website is accepted for the directory you’ll gain a text link or two. This route can be a lot of SEO work and a lot of directories expect a link back (from the home page seems the norm which should be avoided for SEO reasons) for their link!

Unless you have an important site (then you won’t need text links from directories!) you’ll probably find your link deep within the navigation structure of the directory on a low PR (PageRank) page. Don’t make the mistake of seeing a PR8 home page for a directory and thinking your text link will pass PR8 benefit. You won’t get a link anywhere near the home page, on the rare occasion I’ve submitted sites to directories it’s lucky to receive a PR4 link, most are PR3 or less!