9) Reciprocal links
Exchanging links with other websites can still help increase your rankings but it isn’t as effective as it once was. There is good value in exchanging links with prominent websites in your industry. There is also a method of 3-way linking that can be effective but shouldn’t be done in an easily identified pattern.
Recommendation: Try to exchange links with non-competing websites in your industry. 3-way linking can be very effective but you shouldn’t link out to unrelated websites or receive links from unrelated websites, which is a difficult arrangement to be achieved.
10) Inbound link pattern
Inbound links need to be directed to both your homepage and subpages of your website to replicate a natural linking pattern. Many websites make the mistake of only directing links to their homepage and wonder why they aren’t achieving the rankings they desire.
Recommendation: Direct links to your homepage and internal pages of your website. You can still send the majority of links to the homepage because that is more natural but sending links to various pages throughout your website can make a huge difference in your rankings.
11) Link Duration
Ideally you want inbound links to be permanently placed on the website they reside. In certain cases a temporary link can be effective, such as donating to a charity or school and receiving a link for a certain period of time.
Recommendation: Try to acquire permanent links when possible. Links that also reside on a page that will always be seen by the search engines is also a big plus. Donating to government agencies, organizational charities and colleges can be a great way to acquire powerful links but don’t go overboard. Donations are usually expensive and too many links of this nature is also unnatural.
12) Link Footprints
When the words “sponsored”, “paid”, “advertising” or other variations are placed near your link the search engines are sophisticated enough to reduce or eliminate the value of those links.
Recommendation: Review the locations of the links you acquire and make sure that only a limited amount of them have this type of footprint. A good linking service shouldn’t provide you with links that are always marked in this manner.
13) Language
You don’t want links to come from websites that aren’t in the same language as your own.
Recommendation: Make sure you aren’t receiving these types of links from the services you’re utilizing. An occasional miss isn’t a big deal but you do want to avoid a pattern.
14) Cloaked Links
Every search engine has a different algorithm to determine how well you rank. Google doesn’t like site-wide links but Yahoo and MSN do like them. If you cloak those links to not be seen by Google in the source code but still have them viewable by the other search engines site-wide links can be very effective.
Recommendation: This is a grey area tactic and isn’t recommended as a good practice of acquiring links to improve rankings in other search engines besides Google. A human reviewer at Google will still see these links and may wonder why they are blocked in the source code.
15) Google Alerts
This can be an effective tool to identify new subject specific and high trust link targets.
Recommendation: Setup alerts such as these (“useful travel sites” library ‐travelchannel site:.edu) or “useful travel sites” library ‐travelchannel site:.us).
16) Sponsor/Charity links
Add the words “sponsor” and/or “charity” to any of your link searches for keywords you’d like to rank for. These “paid links” fall under the “perfectly acceptable” category in most senses, and offering to sponsor an event or participate in a charitable donation or effort is usually a surefire way to get a link from some very powerful pages. For example, let’s say you wanted to rank well for “chicago real estate,” you might run a search like this (http://www.google.com/search?q=chicago+%22real+estate%22+sponsor+charity).
Recommendation: As explained earlier, these links can be quite expensive and shouldn’t be overdone. Don’t acquire more than 10 to 20 of these types of links unless you are a common sponsor of major events.
