skala[1]You’re probably wondering why I began this post with words “less means more”, I mean, this is not any popular phrase input by web users in search of information. To write it I was inspired by a book by Gerry McGovern “Killer Web Content”, where in one of the chapters entitled “Less means more” he describes a particular human gene, which sits in us from the beggining of humanity and screams more. In case of this book it’s about effective content, which generate incomes and catch people’s eyes, but the idea suits well to many domains of human life and also to the issue of positioning.Every webmaster’s dream (do not mix it up with a spamer) is that his work could be appriciated and his websites visited by the biggest amount of people possible. Nowadays, where there is a lot of information, where we can find several pages of the same domain it is hard to be succesful. It is not easy to convince a web user that our site is the best, and as we know, not every Joe Blow has the finances possible to employ a company to position his site or to use Google AdWords campaign, which often are the key to succes. What is left is gaining knowledge and hard work.

In this rush a lot of begginer webmasters makes a huge mistake, because when they find out that links to our own site from other parts of the internet raises the position of our page, they stop further learning and thay contemplate on how to gain more links and then even more (“more” gene starts to talk) and 3-4 years ago it was accepted mor or less, now it can cause more harm than good.

Beware of unvaluable links!

It turns out, that choosing the links „less means more”. Gaining links from so called back-up, which often are offered on internet auctions for less than a bottle of coke is a waste of time and money especially when we want to sublink, for example our shop with mowing machines on a page with a rockstar. In positioning it is topic connection and the strength of a portal, from which the link is directed to us. The amount is also important of course, but in most of the cases it is better to focus on the quality. While positioning it is good to rethink our actions a couple of times, as taking decisions not thought over make bring only loss – while choosing the links it is good to analyze the portals with such programmes like alexa.com, where we can check the popularity of the portal, is it high in Google for particular phrases and check the amount of indexed subpages. However, in my opinion the best determinant of quality of the domain on which we want our link to be on is to check whether the page itself is high on Google. The easiest way would be to gain links at our competitor’s pages, but as we now this is not possible, but fortunately ther is a lot of portals connected thematically for whom we are not a potential competition.

Of course I do not state that links from other parts of the internet completly not connected thematically do not have any strength, because I do not know the algorithm of Google, and I do not know anyone who knows such thing, but I am sure that such links have less value, if not none.

As I mentioned before such actions were succesful, but systems where we can exchange links showed up together with spamers racing in making pages like descriptions, etc. Fortunately Google has changed the way of “valuation” (if I may call it like this) of such links, but I’ll write about it the next time.