Why Link Pages are Useless

Remember in the old days when all you had to do was create a “link page” and then list all of your favorite friends?  Maybe you called it “Friends of…” or “Recommended Links” or something to that effect.  Well, those days are over.  In this modern age, linking is almost as important as producing excellent content.

How Linking Works and Doesn’t Work

You no longer link for curiosity’s sake or to promote your friends.  You create links for yourself—for your prosperity and your survival in a competitive field.  The number of links you have is an indicator of how important your site is, and thus it will affect your page rank for popular keywords.  Ideally, you are striving for a high number of relevant links.  Just think of how often major sites like Wikipedia, Craigslist or Facebook are linked.  The majority of these links are highly relevant and direct attention to the site because of very specific content.

So think about the proverbial “link page.”  It makes sense, right?  Why go through all the trouble of creating links everywhere if you can just use one page?  Unfortunately, that’s not going to work because search engines consider pages full of links but with little to no content irrelevant.  In fact, link pages are probably not going to be indexed at all, since they too closely resemble SPAM practices.  (SPAM sites basically have an entire website devoted to links…meaning little to no value for human readers)

A Practical View of Link Exchanges

In fact, many webmasters actually ignore requests for link exchanges these days because of this likely scenario.  They work a link into their content and get little to nothing in return.  Sometimes their new partners will merely give them one link in a page of many links…hardly a fair trade for honestly creating a content article around an external link.  Therefore, link exchange requests are often perceived as SPAM requests, especially if there is no personalization in the offer message.  Some webmasters are down on link exchanges entirely, since other web operators can easily remove the links, and since it’s scarcely worth the trouble it involves.

Here’s the inherent problem in this scenario: you are almost always doing someone else a favor by creating a link for them.  People who actually want to go through the trouble of a link exchange usually run less popular sites and want a favor from a more popular magazine in their own niche.  If you’re on top, you get little benefit.

As you can see, you are advised to focus on article marketing, press releases and link exchanges with equally popular or more popular sites (provided you can think of a relevant reason to link exchange that makes it of benefit to them).  Creating a link page just for the sake of a page is not a wise or time efficient move.

(Please note that a page of created links is not the same thing as your own sitemap which is necessary for submitting your pages to search engine crawlers)