Credit: dcandea
New blogs do not often get that many link requests. But once your site starts getting ranked high in the search engines, people will e-mail you, asking you to link back to them. The majority of these requests are not even worth checking out. Nobody wants to link to a spammy site anyway. But once in a while, you receive link requests from high quality (on paper) websites. You don’t want to just ignore every link request nor do you want to be too polite and accept them all. Here are 5 ways you can handle link requests professionally:
- paid link requests are no no: I get a ton of these requests everyday. People will use all kinds of tactics to get their paid links on your website. Some publishers do accept paid links. But that could get their sites slapped by Google. Organic linking is what search engines such as Google are encouraging. If you value your blog and the brand that you have built, you should discard all these paid link requests right away.
- analyze the target URLs: so you feel you have received requests from high quality and legitimate websites? Just because a site has a good looking template or all kinds of bells and whistles all over it does not mean you should link to it. You should thoroughly analyze the target URLs to make sure you are not linking to a banned website.
- verify the site owner: a few months ago, I received an email from an individual who claimed to be the developer of a product I had covered on my blog. Naturally, he wanted me to link to his new site. The individual had done his best to cover his tracks. But a little bit of research did prove he was not the developer after all. If someone is lying to you in their e-mails, they are not worth linking to.
- link to relevant pages: search engines do pay attention to the sites that you link to. Linking to a couple of irrelevant sites may not kill your site’s rankings. If you do it often, that could become a problem for your business. Make sure you link to sites that are somewhat relevant to your blog. To stay on the safe side, use the most appropriate anchor texts for your links.
- monitor your results: link swapping is a big issue these days. Some people may ask you to link to their site only to redirect their URL to a whole new site once they have gathered enough links. You should check the URLs you have linked to from your site to make sure you are not a victim of link swapping.
There is nothing wrong with accepting link requests from high quality websites. Just make sure you do your research to avoid sending your visitors a site that may not be worth their time.
Follow @panah
You may also be interested in:
*some of our articles might include aff links to fund our operations. Please read our disclaimer on how we fund Exxponnet.
{ 0 comments… add one now }