Hubber Advice: Links and Cross-Links

Links and cross-links are important because the more of them there are then the more people are being led to your page. Search engines see this as well and they say, "If all of these people think that this site is important - it must be." They also look at what sites are linking to you, the higher ranking the site that has links to you the more the search engines think of you. This is sort of like the company you keep says a lot about you. So you can try to get a few quality links that mean a lot or a quantity of links that each mean very little.

As in real life, networking is very important. If no one knows who you are then few people will trust you or go to you for something. The more people who know you and tell people about you (link to you) is somewhat like word of mouth in the real world. This is where great reputations come from.

And cross-linking is linking from one of your pages to another one of your pages. It does help to cross-link similar topics as well. Not many people like reading about how to change a toilet's wax seal to clicking on a link and reading about the homeless in Nepal. There just is not a lot in common between the two and people probably won't stay to read what you have to say.

If you are writing about various topics quite frequently then social networks are great to post on. Some of other sites that you will see mentioned over and over and most people will act like you have never heard of them are StumbleUpon, Reddit, and other sites of this nature that let people view links that they are interested in.

Linking in forums is generally easier if you are writing about one or two topics. I say this because if you are very limited on what your write you have time to build a relationship on forums and post the link so others will go to it. If you just log on and try to post them a lot of the time you are ignored or get banned. Many forums have a limit of how many replies you have to make before you can post a link. This is because a lot of people were trying to build links from forums without ever contributing. The forum administrators consider this spam and do not welcome it.

One good way to build some good links if you write about a variety of topics is to research who some of the popular people in the field you are writing about are. Send them an email with a link to your article. The person may put up a link and you have instant advertisement to a group of people that the established person has built a relationship with. They may do nothing at all and ignore you. So what... If they do nothing then oh well, if they link to your article and link it for hundreds of people to see what have interest in the article's topic - GREAT.

There are programs that automate hundreds of links for users. Some of these cost money and others have you sign others up under a reference number in order to obtain usage. Social Monkee is one of these sites that offers a spin service for users to create links.

And for those of you who do not know, spinning is the same article with various words that change so the article is not word for word and doesn't hurt your page ranking with search engines. Some people try to use these to publish so many articles that are technically different. One word of warning is that most of these articles are sub-quality because people are just turning them out. And to take the time to think of the words to spin in an article it is faster for me to simply write the new article.

A lot of people are worried about no-follow links. Personally, I do not care if a site has no-follow links or not. As long as people are following the link to my page. I am not always concerned if a couple of the sites have no-follow policy. No-follow is a tag attribute that tells the search engines DO NOT FOLLOW THIS LINK and that makes it so the search engine doesn't recognize that the site is leading to your page. Taking away any reference credibility that the page with the link would relay to your page. But people still follow the links and read your material and there is a chance that the said person will share it with his/her friends and you will have that many more people visiting. This is the reason I say a link is a link, some are valuable in one way and others are valuable in another.

Links and cross-links can be compared to roads. The more you have leading to your hub means you have more roads coming into town. And more roads coming into town gives more people the possibility of coming to read your article. The more roads a city has on the map the bigger the city is; the more links a page has incoming the higher page rank it will have. Overall, links are very important and bring life to your page.