{"id":13,"date":"2008-06-07T10:05:42","date_gmt":"2008-06-07T14:05:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pro-webs.net\/blog\/?p=13"},"modified":"2008-06-09T11:10:44","modified_gmt":"2008-06-09T15:10:44","slug":"link-building-shop-owners","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pro-webs.net\/blog\/2008\/06\/07\/link-building-shop-owners\/","title":{"rendered":"Beating Your Links Down?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We review commerce sites all the time for shop owners, and I am really very surprised that so many of the stores we review have no idea about Google&#8217;s guidelines regarding links.  I really HATE the fact that shop owners can make use of a links directory in Zen Cart!  Is this your business or a directory?  Today we will take a few minutes to go over the pitfalls of such link pages and the guidelines Google has in place to keep us on the straight and narrow.<\/p>\n<p>Google says this very clearly&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Don&#8217;t <a title=\"Google's Webmaster Guidelines\" href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/support\/webmasters\/bin\/answer.py?answer=66356\" target=\"_blank\">participate in link schemes<\/a> designed to increase your site&#8217;s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or &#8220;bad neighborhoods&#8221; on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>So what parts of this affect these stores with their link directories?<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Links intended to manipulate PageRank<\/li>\n<li>Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (&#8220;Link to me and I&#8217;ll link to you.&#8221;)<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/support\/webmasters\/bin\/answer.py?answer=66736\">Buying or selling links that pass PageRank<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Lets cover #1 &#8220;Links intended to manipulate PageRank&#8221;.  This can be very hard to understand for many shop owners as they have no intention of trying to game Google&#8217;s PageRank system.  Mostly these shop owners are trying to build relevant links in and out, as many &#8220;gurus&#8221; from various forums have instructed them.  Honestly speaking, most are making the actions completely innocently and just lack the understanding of proper linking.  For example&#8230;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Linking out to 500 sites, related or not, will not help you if they are too many and do not provide usefulness to the shoppers on your site.<\/li>\n<li>If shoppers do find and browse you link directory, they are likely to leave for another site.  Is the &#8220;value&#8221; of this link worth the loss of a potential sale?<\/li>\n<li>Additionally, these links in MOST cases would be perceived as advertising and need to be &#8220;nofollowed&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So in a nutshell to make this Google Guideline regarding the manipulation of PageRank perfectly clear&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Any link that you do not personally endorse (vote for) or is advertising in any way, must not be allowed to pass PageRank.  Simple, add a &#8220;nofollow&#8221; tag to the individual links or link directory pages.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>#2 &#8220;Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (&#8220;Link to me and I&#8217;ll link to you.&#8221;)&#8221;.  This one is the one I see most.  People with the link building bug swapping links.  The pitfalls here are mostly hidden from the shop owner and they don&#8217;t even realize they are creating an issue for their store&#8217;s link profile.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>When a link is exchanged and neither is &#8220;nofollowed&#8221;, the link(s) are devalued.  This very simply means Google knows you swapped links and considers them less valuable or accountable than organic\/natural links.<\/li>\n<li>Nothing stirs my fire like a shop owner with a link directory who is flagrantly begging for reciprocal links.  First of all, why don&#8217;t you just send and email to Google and beg them to devalue your links?  Secondly, how do you think this looks to your shoppers?  Yep, you look like a scammer.<\/li>\n<li>Lastly, and perhaps most importantly&#8230; If you get to the point that your link swapping or reciprocal links outnumber your organic links, then you have screwed up your entire link profile and cast a big Google storm cloud over your site.  You have just devalued all of your links.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>#3 &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/support\/webmasters\/bin\/answer.py?answer=66736\">Buying or selling links that pass PageRank<\/a>&#8220;.  You would think with the buzz around that everyone knows this one&#8230; But not so.  I suggest you do not practice the buying and selling of links on your store&#8217;s cart&#8230; Remember this is your business!  None the less as many will buy and sell links anyhow, here are some tips.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Do NOT label these links as &#8220;sponsored&#8221;, &#8220;partners&#8221; etc.  Once again, just login in to Google&#8217;s webmasters tools and report yourself&#8230; Its a bit quicker.<\/li>\n<li>ALL links that have been bought or sold ARE advertising and cannot be allowed to pass PageRank.<\/li>\n<li>I would strongly advise you do not advertise your link bidding\/selling campaign on your website.  Not only does this look awful to your shoppers, but again just tell Google yourself.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Essentially, your store is a place of business&#8230; Not a link directory. This is just plain unproductive, and well dumb.<\/p>\n<p>Seriously, from a consumers vantage they expect very much the same ethical business standards from your online store as any &#8220;brick and mortar&#8221; business.  There is little doubt that link building is a daunting task, but if you loss your ability to impress your customers in the process&#8230; What the point?<\/p>\n<p>Don&#8217;t tell me how you have 5000 visitors a day&#8230; Tell me how many you are converting and how many just bounce.  That is where you will find the answers to build a successful online store.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We review commerce sites all the time for shop owners, and I am really very surprised that so many of the stores we review have no idea about Google&#8217;s guidelines regarding links. I really HATE the fact that shop owners can make use of a links directory in Zen Cart! Is this your business or [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[38,35,15,36,37],"class_list":["post-13","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ecommerce-seo","tag-googles-guidlines","tag-link-building","tag-online-store","tag-paid-links","tag-selling-links"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pro-webs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pro-webs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pro-webs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pro-webs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pro-webs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pro-webs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pro-webs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pro-webs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pro-webs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}