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| Posted by chris on Monday, January 13 @ 12:50:04 EST
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 Well, it's day two without the Google toolbar and so far things are going well. I haven't had anything near the side effects it said on the packet, my rankings haven't slipped in to oblivion and the palpitations are beginning to lessen now. I still get the urge to shout "that's a five" everytime I see a green line, but I'm hoping a therapist can PR0 that. All of this makes it about time to tell you my thoughts on what makes a good linking without the aid of the Google toolbar.
To be truthful, I've never believed in the Google Toolbar as a good decider of who you should link to and who you want to be linked from. The Google toolbar knows nothing about topic, visitor psychology or user interface design.
The web was designed, or at least has grown up to be, an information resource consisting of thousands of sites all interconnected in some way. As a user navigates from one site to another they shouldn't see a sharp contrast, unless they are expecting it, it should be a gentle transfer. So the first rule of linking is to have what many may call a policy, but which I prefer to think of as a link mission statement.
By now some of you are thinking "what's a link mission statement got to do with search engine rankings?". And directly, the answer is nothing. Indirectly, it serves as the buffer that prevents you doing anything that could get you (legitimately) banned from or penalized by the search engines. By having a logical visitor based reasoning behind your linking process you clearly cannot break the rule of linking solely for ranking purposes.
Let me give an example, for this site the link mission statement for outbound links could be described as:
"To provide links to search engine related information on high quality sites which are continously updated or considerably add to the quality of the viewpoints being expressed."
If a link request is made, whether they mention reciprocal links or not, then that is the basis of the decision. Sometimes, there are technical issues that prevent linking, but overall this is the deciding factor.
On this basis, might I link to a bad neighbourhood? The answer is no. Might I link to a site Google determines is a bad neighbourhood? The answer is yes. To further explain this - a bad neighbourhood is not what Google or any single entity says it is, it is what the collective population believes. It you follow sensible linking methodologies then you will never link to a truly bad neighbourhood. To bust a myth, even in the case of Google, linking to what they define as a bad neighbourhood does not immediately cast your site in to the pits of hell. You must link to a quantity of bad neighbourhoods or link to something so severely and obviously bad that you really could have no excuse. Bad neighbourhoods are overly worried about, with sensible strategies you will not be harmed. That's why nobody needs the Google toolbar's PR0s to highlight bad neighbourhoods.
In seeking out links I've found it best to utilise other people's opinions for what are good sites on a similar topic. For this, directories are absolutely essential. It is better to have a look through one directory than to trawl through any number of search engine results. As the engines themselves view directories as important, we are effectively working from the same book and you will find that there are ranking benefits. Some directories you might consider are:
http://www.dmoz.org/
http://www.gimpsy.com/
http://www.joeant.com/
http://www.goguides.org/
In general, those sites that link to a few good resources are better to get a link from than those sites that link to a number of okay resources. Be warned though, these sites are often harder to get links from and reciprocal requests are much less likely to be accepted.
The presence of a listing in a large directory also provides an indication of the sites sustainability. If it's been submitted, waited for listing and been listed for some time then it's a better prospect. Why bother going for links that won't be here tomorrow unless they will bring you considerable traffic today.
It makes terrific sense to keep checking back with these directories to look for more link candidates. Catching them as they come in to the directory maximises your possibility of getting a link that is likely to improve in value as time goes on.
If you need to get still more links then try the sites that are linked to from the sites in the directories!
Those two, very simple, things are enough for any link strategy and will give you good rankings. All without the Google Toolbar!
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