Search Engine Optimization Tutorial

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Low quality links

Low quality inbound links are link that won’t increase the search engine rankings of your web pages. In the best case, low-quality links won’t have any effect at all on your rankings.

In the worst case, low-quality links will have a negative influence on the rankings of your pages.

Four factors that define a low-quality link

1. The link uses the nofollow tag

Links that contain the nofollow tag might help you to get direct traffic from the website with the link, but they are useless for your search engine rankings. The nofollow tag is a HTML attribute that has been introduced by Google, Google Mobile and Bing.

It allows webmasters to mark links that should not be followed by search engine robots. If Google finds a link with the rel=”nofollow” attribute, Google will not use the link as a positive signal for the linked page.

2. The link is from an automated linking scheme

Automated linking schemes usually promise hundreds of links in a very short time with very little work. As these linking schemes have been created for the sole purpose of cheating search engines, search engines don’t like them at all.

All major search engines have employees who actively seek for these linking schemes. Search engines know all linking schemes and links from these schemes don’t have a positive effect on your search engine rankings. Worse than that, many search engines will ban your website if you link to a linking scheme website, because they consider it spam.

Avoid these automated linking systems at all costs! Use common sense: If you can find the automated system, search engines can also find it.

3. The link doesn’t go directly to your website

Some websites do not link directly to your website. They link to a page on their own website that redirects to your website, for example, “//www.example.com/redirect.php?3152.”
You might get direct traffic through these links, but they won’t help your search engine rankings.

4. The link cannot be parsed by search engine spiders

Search engine spiders are very simple programs. If the link to your website cannot be found easily, chances are that the spiders will ignore the link to your site. Most search engine spiders have difficulty with links in JavaScript code. If the link to your website is hidden with a scripting language, search engine spiders won’t parse it.

Continue with ‘The effect of co-citation‘.