Getting High Quality Web Design Sites to Link Together

[AlaskaWebDesign]

Hi,

We have a PR 5 Website that has been around for about ten years. (http://www.nwds-ak.com). We used to rank well on first page of Google for Alaska Web Design.

I want to be on top again. To do this, I would like to get relevant sites of good quality linked to our site, but in areas that don't compete with us. We are in Alaska, obviously.

How do I get others with reputable sites to link back to me? I asked about 20 companies in other parts of the country where I don't compete. Poor results.

We created a links page: http://www.nwds-ak.com/Links.aspx, but nobody comes yet.

Any suggestions?

[Webzarus]

The "high quality links" that you need to make this work ( based on your theory), are the ones you say you don't want...

google bases quality links ( incoming ) as links from similar or complimentary sites to yours.

Back links USED to be the backbone of a sites success and location on search engines. This is no longer the case ( just for your stated reason ).

You are more likely to get better page level position and overall site position though good relevant content than you will from back links.

several of my clients get offers from companies wanting "back links" and "reciprocal links" quite regularly. I advise them not, not because of the site, but because they offer no value ( in the relative scheme of things )... since I keep them pretty high up on search results through content and content updates, they don't need to "go backwards" ( that's my opinion )

[TheGAME1264]

What WZ said. The problem with your question is that it's based on thinking that was partly correct about 10 years ago and has become more incorrect as time has passed.

Look at it this way...if I'm a web design company in Wyoming (hypothetical), and you ask me to link to you...what's in it for me? Even if you link back to me, it doesn't mean I'm going to gain anything. In all likelihood, the more I give out or even exchange links (boy, there was an idea doomed to fail), the more I lead my prospective customers away from my site never to return. If I'm going to lead customers away from my site, I'd better have a good reason to do it.

Not only that, I'm not going to link to any other web designer or company since web design is not strictly bound by geographic terms. Leaving the hypothetical and going back to a real-life example, I have clients in New York, Tampa Bay, Anaheim, Arlington, Virginia, and Peoria, Illinois, and I'm based in a suburb of Toronto. I'm not likely to acquire a client in say Juneau, but it's not impossible either.

What you also have working against you is that you're far from the only one making this sort of a request. My clients and I get hundreds of silly link requests a week, and that's just by email. (For some strange reason, more SEO wannabes are cold-calling lately...likely because VoIP service is dirt cheap to acquire). When we hear 99 of those and you're the 100th, chances are you're not going to sound any different than the previous 99.

Like WZ said, a large percentage of links have quite rightly lost their value because they were created for "SEO reasons" (yet another example of mindless stupidity on the part of the web marketing community). If you're looking for those links and mentioning things such as PageRank (wow, it's been a while since I've seen anyone not selling their site bring that up), that's your problem right there. The only links worth getting are the ones that are earned, which means you have to go out and earn them by offering something useful.

[woods]

Good learning in that post. It's largely quality over quantity these days, quality defined by 100+ properties. It's way easier to be legit and awesome if you ask me

[Squadron]

Hi Chris, you have some nice links from great sites like Smashing Magazine, Six Revisions and Line25. If I were you, I'd get more of the same and not bother with the link exchange work. PR5, gotta love that

I suspect the reason you don't rank higher for Alaska web design is you are trying to make the home page work too hard for too many different search terms. The current title tag for the home page is Anchorage, Alaska Web Design & Software Development-Web Programmers

If you want the home page to rank better for Alaska web design, I suggest you at least trial changing your title tag to Alaska Web Design - Anchorage

[TheGAME1264]

First of all, PageRank...as in the external one shown by Google...is completely and totally useless, and has been for several years now for the reasons WZ stated above and more. It's not a ranking factor, it's infrequently updated, and it's nothing more than an SEO unit of currency. If anyone out there thinks otherwise, consider that the last time you saw your PageRank change, you probably didn't see a corresponding and proportional change in traffic. If you did, you saw it because you wanted to see it, not because it was there. So whether you have a PR5, PR0, PR10 or PRwhatever really has no bearing on traffic.

Second, the types of links you're talking about are the low-hanging fruit that Google has been targeting for the past year now, and with good reason. The one from Smashing Magazine, for example, is a blog comment. There is absolutely no logical reason why anyone should receive some sort of search engine boost because they posted what obviously was a self-serving comment on a high-traffic site. That's assuming, of course, that there is one...and since there's no way to conclusively tell in a positive way whether a link is worth anything, there's no real point in going after "SEO backlinks" (by the way, that Smashing Magazine link contains the rel="nofollow" attribute, so it's not going to pose any benefit from a Google standpoint anyway).

The link exchange is actually a good point, however...if I was to go after your market and did something silly like rank checking and saw your site, I'd immediately flag it in a spam report and mention the link exchange page (among other things). SEO's kind of like makeup...if you can spot it clearly, it isn't applied right.

[delstu]

When did you lose your page 1 rankings for Alaska Web Design? Can you pin down the date?

Google's algorithmic changes may be the reason you lost your position and the date can confirm that. Any link-scheme is likely to harm your SERPs, including what you seem to want to do.

You might even want to get some of your backlinks removed.