Increasing Site Traffic - Too Many Linkeroos

Tip 15: Too Many Outbound L!nks

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Avoid creating pages with all links and no text.

This is a big red flag for Google as they're trying to crack down on link farms and large link exchanges. In years past, you used to be able to rank at the top of Google simply by getting lots of simple backlinks to your site. So, link farms popped up - these are sites that had no purpose other than to link to dozens, hundreds, or thousands of sites together. Each site links to the other sites in the group in order to spam the index of a search engine, and improve its own ranking.

Also, people started to create link exchange pages. These were pages of links on people's websites. Google doesn't seem to have a problem with small scale link exchange between sites that have similar content, but when people get carried away trading links with anyone and everyone they can, it gets a little crazy. When Google sees a page with lots and lots of links, they'll start to wonder if these are serious exchanges between Webmasters within the same niche.

Back in the day, it worked like this: Webmaster A emails Webmaster B and says, "If you link to me, I'll link to you." Links would be added to each person's exchange page and the link would boost them both up in the search rankings. As a result, low-quality sites could reach the top of the search results far too easily, despite very little merit.

Google started to become wise to this theory and began to crack down on these sites. Many link farms were de-indexed from Google. And many link exchange pages lost their Google PageRank. Some sites with large link exchange pages were even de-indexed entirely, and can no longer be found at all.

So, my recommendation is to avoid large link exchange pages and link directory sites altogether.

Does that mean link exchanges are dead? Not necessarily. Remember Google does want people to link to external pages. That is a big part of how they rank pages. They just got sick of people exchanging links like crazy for the sole purpose of bumping their sites to the top.

I also suggest using linking that's more 'natural' instead. How? If you're going to offer someone else a link on your site, place it within an article or on a page with only a few other links. Be sure the text description of the site is long, so the link-to-text ratio is low. If your pages have lots of text and only a few links and you should be OK.

Increasing Website Traffic - Outbound L!nks