What Not To Do [SEO Linking]
Posted by jonathan at 8:34am EST on 08/26/2009
Linkbacks are still a critical part of SEO. Here is one example of how this company is doing themselves a dis-service.
Linking back to yourself using Flash is generally a bad idea. Indeed, spiders are getting better at crawling Flash for content, but that it’s not going to be nearly as powerful as it would be if you were to link to yourself with a clear, plain-text, keyword rich, link.
A link like this, WordPress Consulting, is going to be far more powerful than a link embedded in Flash.
Why?
Search engines are just beginning to be able to crawl and index Flash. That means that this type of technology is years behind the normal method of crawling a link and following it. The normal method is how the web is built. Links pointing to other links pointing to other links.
So why would you want to link to yourself using fairly new technology when you could use older, proven technology, that works more effectively? Don’t say “because it looks prettier” because the bottom line is, if you want to rank for something, don’t try to do it the “pretty” way, do it the proven way.
Kussa
Aug 26th, 2009
nice info
please let me know the advantages of linking back to myself.
can it pull my PR highly?
Jonathan Dingman
Aug 26th, 2009
Linking back to yourself, from say a client’s website, will definitely help your rankings if you can choose the correct keywords for anchor text. It’s just like any other linkback to your site, and it’s likely going to be highly targeted because it’s a property you’ve worked on.
Hazar
Oct 28th, 2009
Also the relevancy is very important between those sites. If there is not any relevancy in terms of content, it won’t be a fair enough help for the ranking.
Bart
Aug 27th, 2009
What about if you have an image that is used to display the type of content that you are linking to within the site? Or should you just put a plain text link underneath the image?
Jonathan Dingman
Aug 27th, 2009
A straight, clear-text link, will definitely be better than an image or flash. An image won’t give you near the same “weight” as the clear-text will, but you can use the alt= tag to give yourself some weight and naming the image something with your keywords couldn’t hurt.
Names for the image really won’t have any direct impact on SEO, but none the less, it couldn’t hurt (unless you have over 500 characters in your image name, which is a generally bad idea, I think.
The rank of best to worst:
clear-text -> image -> flash
clear-text is the best, image is alright, flash isn’t that great.
Craig Fifield
Aug 30th, 2009
I agree with you, I’d make it a juicy link. However, I do know some in the design world consider it bad form. And others due to WP theme sponsoring think it is risky these days as well.
What is truly bad about that link is it requires visitors to have flash installed. If they don’t it will break the clients site and the designer won’t get any traffic from it.