Page 96 - Professional Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

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95 Professional Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

8.1.2.2 Low quality inbound links

Low quality backlinks are link that won't increase your search engine rankings. In the
best case, low quality links won't have any effect at all on your rankings.
In the worst case, low quality links can cause search engines to ban your website from
their search results.
When is a link a low quality link? Several points make a link a low quality link:

1. The link uses the nofollow attribute
Links that contain the nofollow attribute might help you to get direct traffic from the
website with the link but they are totally useless for your search engine rankings. The
nofollow attribute is a HTML attribute that has been introduced by Google, Yahoo
and Bing.
It allows webmasters to mark links that should not be followed by search engine
spiders. The attribute can be added to link tags in the HTML code of web pages:
<a href="http://www.example.com/page.html" rel="nofollow">This is a link.</a>
If Google finds a link with the rel="nofollow" attribute, Google will not follow
through to that page, they will not count the link in calculating PageRank scores and
they will not count the anchor text in determining what terms the page being linked
to is relevant for.

2. The link is from an unrelated website
If the link to your website is on a web page that links to every Tom, Dick and Harry
then it's likely that it won't have a positive effect on your search engine rankings. Try
to get links from web pages that are related (even loosely) to your website.
Further information about the effect of links from a web page that links to very
different pages can be found in the chapter The effect of co-citation on your rankings
97 .

3. The link is from an automated linking scheme
Some years ago, webmasters could blast their website URL to thousands of FFA (free-
for-all) pages to quickly get hundreds of links. Search engines quickly discovered that
and nowadays, links from FFA pages won't help your rankings at all.

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