How do you sort out your relevant links and your crap links? For example my Gamer Union site doesn't even have content on it and I've got almost 800 pages linking to it from my forums sig. Is it good to have a lot of backlinks even if most of them are crap and not related to your site at all or does it harm your site? I don't want to load my site up with content about the gaming culture and then the SE's get pissed because all my backlinks come from web design forums and put me on page 25 for searches.

I also noticed while looking at the list of sites that there are a lot of gaming sites that are not linking to me but using the phrase Gamer Union or Gamer's Union in a conversation or post that has nothing to do with my site. Am I getting freebies for having a cool domain name? If they are showing up when I use googles link function that means they are being counted as relevant links coming from another gaming site right?

Thanks for any advice.

Snot -ah the arts of linkbuilding hay - well there are a few things id say to you...

there are gradients the quality of a link -- these are basic kind of principles tht the google rotates of right.. combination of words... so when you say pages mention you - thats called LSI - latent samantic indexing or something like that -it goes of the pagerank algo i think and picks up sentence level/ paragraph level combinations of words... But if they were to anchor thext where they have mentioned you - thats a link and thus defines that whole paragraph where as your word was just a part of it before...

moving on - the link form your forums - althought plentyfull - is one IP address, on subdomain forums this could have more weight if your posts were in sepate subdoms. but essentially they are small and weak.

Now if you want your site to rank for something like flash games, your going up against some competition, even media frim - like fox etc - but yea you could get there - anchor text up (but keep it orgaic) the key words you want is various places around the web - as vairous places have various strenghts and properties, the variety and spread of links will ensure you rank - and if it gets tough at the top - mix up your anchor text footprint to catch long tail searches....

DCx

Thanks for the help M8

So if I am reading that right...

Anchor text is a lot better than plentiful forum backlinking? Another words I would have better luck anchoring my keywords on different social bookmarking/web 2.0 websites such as "website traffic tips" or "building web traffic" with a link to my homepage would actually do better?

Another question I have... If I promote articles on my website, which are in a different directory.. for example websitehere.com/subcategory/article... does that help promote my whole domain name or just the article that is receiving the backlink?

Links from the same site or IP is less rated that links from various sites or ips

You really need a combination of quantity and quality when building links. Quantity is just a bulk full of links from anyone. Then you need quality links with high page ranks and have relevant content that you are linking your page too. And you need to build these links up slowly or Google will penalize you for your SEO work.

Originally Posted by Snot

my Gamer Union site doesn't even have content on it and I've got almost 800 pages linking to it from my forums sig.

Wouldn't it be great if Gamer Union is an Adsense For Domain site? You should be making bucks daily by now.

Every link counts (unless it has the nofollow attribute).

There is no such thing as "quality" links. Google ranks by importance and relevance.


imo,
Bompa

Originally Posted by Bompa

Every link counts (unless it has the nofollow attribute).

There is no such thing as "quality" links. Google ranks by importance and relevance.


imo,
Bompa

so.. if i put link on a low-pagerank-ed site, it still count and give an effect ??

I didn't think pagerank made any difference. I thought it lost its weight along time ago and now its just used for padding the price of a domain your trying to sell?

As for links the way I understand it the pagerank is useless. What you need is a lot of sites that share the same content as your site linking to you. For example if you have a site about games and you have 10000 links coming in from other sites about games you are kicking ***. However if you have 10000 links coming in from random sites like web design forums its better then nothing but the se's wont pull your page up in a search result for what you want.

A user could be more likely to find your site searching for "Why wont this div align center" than they would searching for something related to games. Is that about how it works?

I haven't read anything saying that but I know when I search for games I can't even find my site. When I search for why is my web layout broken it comes up number 1. Not really but it's easyer to find it going that route than it is looking for it where I want it to be. I plan to change that when I get content on it thought. Thats the most important part.

The way you want to get links is not by spamming your url all over the web. Its by building a site that has quality content that users want to read and share. Anything else you do to get more links to your site is just a shortcut or a way of trying to make up for having a lack of interesting content.

There is such thing as quality links. Links with higher pagerank and in your niche are of course higher "quality" than links from random websites. That is not to say crap backlinks are worthless, but a quality backlink definitely holds more authority.

perhaps snot you could try to approach some high ranking gaming bloggers to do a review when your site is running some content and ask them to put a link to you, that would be quality and relevant. But you would need to do something for them in return I would think and thats where you need to be imaginative.