About 'Non-topical' linking

Does it work and is it worth it?

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** UPDATE ** Linking policy change - please read this

Normally you would never consider linking to web sites that are not 'on topic' or related to you core industry or products. However, every little bit helps.

Objections range from a dilution effect of your website's primary categorization - in the search engines' (SE's) assessment of you - to imagined 'penalties' by the SEs because you might be link spamming.

Perceived negatives of non-topical linking

A little common sense is needed here.

Firstly, no-one knows the search engine's algorithms - they are tightly-guarded commercial secrets, so any such talk of negatives is speculation - UNLESS your action violates the webmaster's guidelines published, in the linked example, by Google - and UNLESS you unwittingly or otherwise link to a 'bad neighborhood.'

Your only 'reality check' when evaluating the myriad opinions about search engine optimization is to ask yourself: "Does this try to deceive people visiting my web site?" You also immediately ask part two of that question: "Does my action try to decieve the search engine?" (Note: answering 'yes' is bad)

As a sort of corollary, ask yourself: "Does my action help the people visiting my web site?" If the answer is 'neutral' to 'yes' you proceed, and then consider how it benefits you.

Linking to 'off-topic' web sites cannot, from a common sense viewpoint, penalize you - UNLESS, and UNTIL a scientific study, or a reverse-engineering of SE algorithms, PROVES otherwise. And that day is a while off. It's coming, but ..

The positives of non-related links

** UPDATE ** Linking policy change - please read this

There are many different ways of deploying links and each has its own subtle and sometimes slight benefits, though experience from 'link rings' or 'web rings' (legitimate relationships with other genuine bonafide webmasters - not 'link farms'!) suggests a very strong benefit.

For example, you can set aside part of your web site for user-submitted articles that are linked quitely, but from the SE's viewpoint strongly with respect to page rank, from your main page.

The articles are intended as landing pages for your link partner and contain one or many keyword-rich links back to their web site, which benefits from your page rank AND increases their link popularity by adding to their backward links.

And - this is the important thing for you - it DOES NOT hurt your page rank. You give that away free because you don't lose any by giving it away. It's like kudos. They bathe in your glow ... you do have glow, don't you?

You gain goodwill and a greatly-increased likelihood of a return favor.

Your web site gains FREE (hopefully good-quality, but that is under your control, at least) content and is seen to be growing much faster by the search engines, whose spiders return for more frequent updating.

And your web site is increasing seen as a hub web site by the search engines.

Note, a true 'hub' is a directory, and is considered a central repository of resources and links by human (err, people) visitors. That is full-blown 'topical linking' though not what this article is about.

Repeating, every little bit helps, and this is an easy way to get benefits in this area of web site building and promotion.

And remember the advisory: It's all about balancing effort and not wasting time on trivia while gaining as much as you can for the least time and energy. I think that's called efficiency.

Because, you might have noticed, this is all very hard work.

Thank goodness we love it.

Summary: in SheepOverboard's desperation to get ANY and ALL links from other web sites, we have several types of link pages:

** UPDATE ** Linking policy change - please read this

A relevant, topical, links page that benefits readers directly, as they presumably arrived at our website seeking information or products to buy, via very specific or deliberate web browsing.

A free-for-all, non-topical, links page intended to help EVERYONE get those valuable page ranks (no matter how pathetic) pointed their way. You NEVER know, one of those sad little PR1 webmeisters might, in a year, be pointing his page rank EIGHT at you!!

An articles section for you to submit self-promotional press-realease or essay-style material. It should be half-decent, and written at least as well as you would for your own web site. If it's poor-quality it simply will not be found.

Explaining further, such articles probably won't get browsed much from the SheepOverboard Submitted Articles Index, but if well-written and optimized on a unique subject, they can easily rate in the search engines, and become excellent landing pages leading to your web site. More importantly, they will be high-quality backlinks.

Let me guess, you forgot this and were starting to ask "Hey, why would I put such good stuff on your website?" That's right, because you want topical incoming links - known by Google as 'backward links' - plus any page rank they might carry. And the additional free content won't hurt me.

If you have have "affordable advertising opportunities, for example pixel ads like this" on your site AND it has Google page rank 4 or greater (we are PR4) please let us know.

** Sorry, links to pharmacy, gambling and age restricted sites will not be posted.

Cloaking, redirects, link farms, doorways, robots.txt blocking, or other subterfuge will result in you acquiring links only from like-minded people - so you will only WASTE one-another's time.