Forward Links - Because who you link to matters
Posted Wednesday, December 13th, 2006. Filed under Link Building.
Most of you heard about SEOmoz making changes in how they link out and use nofollow. Rand explained that a visible amount of their 10K+ members were linking to some naughty places, and unless they wanted all links at SEOmoz to lose their value, they needed to take care with who they link out to.
This echoes advice Matt once gave about nofollow: in an ideal world it would only be for untrusted links, and once a user builds up enough trust, those nofollows could be removed. So often SEOs get focused on who they get backlinks from that they overlook who they link out to.
Stuntdubl put it well: link to people more intelligent than yourself, and eventually people might believe you're smart too. Martinibuster raised the question of what makes a "bad neighborhood," since even a relevant site can be a bad neighbor. Neuron added that when reviewing a site to link to, the prime factor is who they link to — if a site links willy-nilly to casino sites and the like, that's a bad neighbor.
I ran jimboykin.com through our new Forward Links Tool, which took 22 minutes and found 426 forward links, 77 (18.1%) of which were reciprocated (if more than 50% of your links are reciprocal, I'd start to worry — that's not natural). The moral: the SEO of 2007 includes looking more closely at who you link to, not just for rankings, but for the trust your site might pass.
December 13th, 2006 at 5:31 am
Jim,
a nice roundup of a lot of discussion about some pretty old news, at least to me…
your post here
http://www.jimboykin.com/linking-out-the-overlooked-link-neighborhood
as well as a lot of older posts around WMW, DP and I guess also SEOMOZ talked the link-out factor , in fact start of 2005 when we started talking (and thinking?) trust-rank this was here…
but you digging out all these artifacts was very interesting…
best,christoph
December 13th, 2006 at 6:01 am
Forward links tool error:
“Software error:
Illegal division by zero at forward-link-title-tag-tool-5.pl line 429.”
(I suspect this error may be cause when inputting a site with a subdomain)
December 13th, 2006 at 9:19 am
Thank you Jim for new toy.
Thanks this tool I have found that we are not prepared well for 2007 but back to the tool.
I have found that not all “Title Tag (or error message)”s are in the proper line with URL. So you get wrong Title for URL (lines 44,45) or you get wrong indication of Error URL (lines 250, 251). May be even “Reciprocal?”.
44 http://www.rockcafe.cz Palac Akropolis N
45 http://www.pruvodce.com/zvikov Rock Café N
250 http://www.praguepost.com [Lookup failed. 404 Not Found] N
251 http://www.tigertiger.cz/en/index.htm The Prague Post Online
December 13th, 2006 at 9:51 am
richard - yup - subdomains don’t work…even msn’s linkfromdomain can’t handle subdomains.
December 13th, 2006 at 11:17 am
Shame about the limitation with sub-domains as I have been recommending that tool more and more. It might be possible to do a kluge for sub-domains by working with a “site:” search.
December 13th, 2006 at 12:23 pm
Great post Jim… You mentioned going to Yahoo to see which specific pages link out to a particular link. Have you thought about incorporating this into your tool? Maybe have a link next to each link that points to the specific page on your site where that link is located…
Tony
December 13th, 2006 at 12:31 pm
Tony - yup….coming any day now…..I also realized that as I was making my post (hey, wouldn’t it be great if there was a link that showed that). Soon.
December 13th, 2006 at 5:03 pm
Jim … that’s a nice tool. Thanks.
If one of these days I decide to post all the tools I use on my blog, I think that a good percentage of them will be yours.
December 13th, 2006 at 5:27 pm
Ya know I love links - getting backlinks is the best “thanks” I could get
December 14th, 2006 at 8:15 am
It Matters To Whom You Link…
Jim Boykin published a recap of all the things (well, almost all) that have been said by the gurus of the SEO world about whom to link to and not to link to. Interesting post in the sense that it encapsulates wisdom from many sources.
Technorati Tags: …
December 14th, 2006 at 12:49 pm
Hey Jim…. Great tool… It seems like a few of the results I am seeing are old results. Is this tool pulling from Yahoo’s outdated cache results via API?
Brett
December 14th, 2006 at 1:38 pm
Cool tool, Jim! I’ve been using it since you announced your new tools… but it would be even more cool if you could include the title and link-type in the export…
December 15th, 2006 at 8:56 am
Very good read Jim! Reminded me of some clean up I’ve been needing to do!!
Off to play with your tools =)
December 19th, 2006 at 5:33 pm
Cool tool Jim, but unfortunately I have tons of nofollowed redirect URLs on the domain I want to check and its following all of them. Could you mod the script so it’ll ignore nofollows?
December 21st, 2006 at 1:42 am
Thank you Jim for providing such a useful tool.
December 31st, 2006 at 12:44 pm
Is this fowarding tool still working…
February 20th, 2007 at 1:12 am
Hey Jim, great post. I’ve been reading a few of your posts now and you’re doing a great job. What I want to know is:
Should webmasters worry about who they are linking to to avoid getting banned by Google ( and other SEs) or to rank higher?
How do you know what sites our potential linking partner is linking to? Is a simple yahoo site explorer search enough?
February 24th, 2007 at 5:13 pm
I would just say that Google wants to do something but not sure what would be the right thing.
March 1st, 2007 at 11:44 am
I guess there are two things I’m most annoyed about with the nofollow rule.
1. Google didnt bring it out with the intention of helping bloggers remove spam… that was one big ly as spam is worse than it has ever been.
2. All the big blog (wordpress) services/software jumped on board without much thought.
And to this day I still don’t understand why wordpress doesnt bring in something as suggested… where you can allow links to other sites by people commenting when the comments reach a certain number or degree of input.
I’ve been looking for such a plugin and am yet to find one. Does anyone have any ideas or know of one?
Thanks, Chris
March 20th, 2007 at 2:48 pm
[...] In a post titled “Forward Links - Because who you link to matters” we find this: [...]
March 26th, 2007 at 8:10 am
[...] Jimboykin.com Tips for finding the best pages to get links from. Part Two: Tips for finding the best pages to get links from. Get backlinks from pages that have backlinks. Natural Backlinks - Getting backlinks without even asking. The Historical Importance of Backlinks. Text around your links…Keeping it Natural Looking. Forward Links - Because who you link to matters Why that site with 50 backlinks beats your site with 1000 backlinks. Cherry Picking Links - Believe it! [...]
May 23rd, 2007 at 12:10 am
I can’t agree more. I believe that Google do something which is natural for users, so “be natural” is the key.
August 3rd, 2007 at 4:34 pm
Is there anyone really knows how google’s algorithm work. Or will just have to focus on back links to have a better ranking.
September 6th, 2007 at 12:32 pm
[...] I know in the past I’ve talked about Forward Links - Because who you link to matters. [...]
October 15th, 2007 at 12:30 am
[...] I was just spending some quality time reading a great article from Jim Boykin on the subject of outbound links. He had some really great advice for analyzing outbound links. Use MSN’s linkfromdomain command to see who you’re linking to, or who a prospective link deal site is linking out to….this methods is OK. [...]
December 13th, 2007 at 5:13 am
[...] Forward Links — Because Who You Link to Matters (Jim Boykin) [...]
December 16th, 2007 at 9:42 am
I’d be interested to know if the content of the web site to which you link can have a negative influence on your own ranking, if the content is completely unrelated. For example having links to charities that you may support but who have nothing to do with your own services and products.
Someone mentioned this to me a few weeks back. Seems a little odd if you could get penalised for that.
April 7th, 2008 at 7:34 pm
[...] Bad neighbourhoods, to Google, are typically identified by spammy on-page ‘seo‘ techniques and dubious backlink and interlink profiles. You do not want to link to these neighbourhoods, because who you link to matters. [...]