Checklist of links that count, that count and pass link juice and links
that don't Count

There is a difference between links that count and links that help rank a website, also there is a set of links that never count.

Links that count and help rank a website;

1. Links from good authority websites like major news sites, major blogs and other quality sites.
2. Links through link exchanges from quality sites many argue that reciprocal links don’t work but in my point of view , reciprocal links do work if done with the right websites
3. Links from article syndication through this plays a small role in helping a website rank but still it helps. The problem with these sites is that due to the large amount of syndication that happens Google devalues links from too many duplicate copies but still some links work.
4. Links from directories. Directories like dmoz, yahoo provide the maximum link juice but some paid directories or other human edited free directories also pass link juice to a website
5. Links from press releases: Yes links from press releases still work and they do help a site push its rankings
6. Text based links – Today this is the hot topic since Google is finding it hard to combat text links bought for link juice and Pagerank they are penalizing sites for buying and selling links. Penalties include loose of trust in Google, looking some value of toolbar pagerank, totally removed from search engines etc. But ofcourse they do work and links bought from big sites tend to pass a lot of link juice.
7. Links from social linking where people link to your site because they link you, this also plays a important factor and does help in rankings
8. Link from some sponsors, say you sponsor a event and they link back yes it helps if the linking site is non-profit or high quality site with already good reputation in Google.
9. Links inside PDFs and word Docs also count for link popularity if they are from good recognized sites.
10. Links from forum footer do count but to a very small extent, Its important the forum doesn’t do anything to stop spreading of link popularity

Links that count but don’t help in boosting rankings:

1. Link from social bookmarking sites like Digg, delicious, technorati etc. These links as far as our research goes are crawled very well by Google and other search engines but they don’t pass pagerank or link juice since most of the links are NOFOLLOW. Nofollow is a syntax added to the HREF tag for search engines to understand that the linking site is not trustworthy or simply that they are links that are beyond editorial control.
2. Link from wikipedia yes it counts but again not for Pagerank or link juice but good for Google love, Wikipedia also has Nofollow in most of its pages but all search engines pick links from wikipedia and crawl it.

Links that don’t count nor help in Search Engine Rankings:

1. Links from sites banned by search engines. If a search engine finds a link from banned site it don’t even follow it mostly and they never count as a link nor pass link popularity.
2. Link from Spam sites which again is blacklisted by search engine algorithm don’t count.
3. Link from blogspam, comment spam are not counted as link popularity links anymore with search engines.
4. Links that are embedded in Javascript don’t count since JavaScript is not crawled by search engines.
5. Links inside Adsense ads are not crawled since its embedded in JavaScript and they also are in IFRAME.
6. Links inside some complicated Flash files are not crawlable since search engines don’t understand complicated flash.
7. Links inside password protected pages / password protected PDFs don’t count.
8. Links from pages which are inside search results and only accessible by searching through a search button don’t count.

Search Engine Genie SEO Blog Team,

Labels: Google

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