Do You Know Who’s Linking to Your Site?
Posted by Yvette | Under SEM 101 Wednesday Feb 3, 2010
Many of us have heard the common show business phrase: “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.” Unfortunately, the same isn’t true for links. It would seem that any traffic is good traffic, right? As long as people are coming to your site, it doesn’t matter how they got there, right? Well, yes and no.
As a general rule, it is great to have more and more traffic coming to your website. But remember, that Google and all the other search engines, are working diligently to ensure that every website owner is getting authentic traffic either from organic SEO or legitimate paid search. If something looks questionable, they’re going to notice.
What types of websites do you not want linking to you? Any website that has a reputation for trying to spam the search engines, a website that seems to exist just to generate traffic, or known link farming companies are not good sites to have linked to yours.
Don’t be alarmed. While there are times that Google will penalize a website for utilizing unethical linking techniques, they’re really good at sniffing out the sites that are just out to game the system. If you have a legitimate website, with a legitimate business and only a small percentage of your links are bad, Google will usually not come after you. Instead what they’ll often do is ignore those links. They simply won’t use them when considering where to place your website on the results page.
The truth of the matter is that almost every website on the World Wide Web has links pointing to it from questionable sources. There is usually no rhyme or reason to these bad links. However, this doesn’t mean that the search engines are even remotely soft on unethical link building practices. If they notice that your website’s bad links are coming in from companies that are known for selling and/or trading links, or if they notice that all of the questionable links point to a page on your website that you’ve been trying to optimize, then they will dig deeper to find out what’s going on.
There are lots of ways to find out who’s linking to you. Here’s a short list of websites and companies that can help: http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps, https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com, and http://wholinkstome.com/.
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