How To Use A “Server-Side 301 Redirect” To Get Credit For All Your Inbound Links

March 30, 2007

Many search engines rank web pages based on the number and “authority” of “inbound links” pointing to the web page in question.

In Google’s PageRank System, for example, a link from page A to page B is a vote, by page A, for page B.

Beacuse of rampant abuse by “Link Spammers,” Google’s PageRank Algorithm is in “Perpetual Tweak” — in this instance, just having thousands of links pointing to your website may not be good enough — A vote from an authority site carries more weight than from a lesser site, for example a link from the front page of www.bbc.com to the front page of www.afroarticles.com will count more than one thousand links from several www.IamAnewLowTrafficSite.com or www.IamAsiteWithNoTopicalSimilaritiesWithAfroArticles.com, so to speak.

Apart from being a high traffic “heavyweight” site, bbc.com is essentially an “article” site like afroarticles.com — hence the importance of relevant inbound links.

The notion of one link, one vote is no longer valid.

That said, “reciprocal linking” is not dead — it has just metamorphosed into “relevant reciprocal linking,” in order to thwart link-spammers. Note: We have tons of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) articles in our database to help guide you on this issue: Go Read Them!

On How To Get Credit For All Your Inbound Links, Ross Dunn writes:

Does your website have an alter ego? Strangely enough, the following addresses are considered separate websites by the search engines:

http://www.yourdomain.com (the “www” version)
http://yourdomain.com (the “non-www” version)

Though visitors see the same content, in the search engine world this situation poses a serious issue relating to link popularity. If the “www” version of your website has 300 inbound links and the “non-www” version has 300 inbound links, then each version is getting credit for only 300 links rather than the total 600.

Here are some immediate steps you can take to minimize the problem: Go Read The Rest of The Article!

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