We estimate that your link popularity accounts for about 40% of where you rank in Google. Consequently, it’s important to make sure your inbound links are providing as much link juice for your website as possible. Having a steady stream of new incoming links is important. But what about all of those old links that have been around for a while? Are they as effective as they might be? Why not take a look at that, because fixing existing links is a lot easier than obtaining brand-new ones.

Here are a few things you can do by way of link maintenance to make sure that those old links are giving you as much link juice as possible.

Correct any links that point to an old domain name.

If you’ve changed your domain name, all the links to your old domain name are doing you no good. The easiest thing to do is to arrange for a 301 permanent redirect from the old domain name to the new one. That should result in the links to the old domain name passing link juice to the new one. Unfortunately, they don’t pass 100% of their value.

Your best bet is to arrange for that redirect, but then contact the webmasters who link to your old website and asked him to change the links so they point to your new domain. That should bring the link values back up to 100%.

Sadly, we are dealing with a client today whose original domain name was owned by their previous web design company. They’ve had their website redesigned, and it’s now at a much better domain name. Unfortunately, their old web design company seems unwilling to arrange for a “redirect” from the old domain name to the new one. With no redirect possible, this client is getting no value from those old links until they get re-pointed to the new domain name.

Fix any links to your website that are broken.

Check your website analytics to find all links that are going to nonexistent pages on your website. Identify those links and contact those webmasters asking them to change the links so they point to real pages. If for any reason you’re unable to reach those webmasters, or if they’re unwilling to cooperate, then you need to arrange 301 permanent redirects  to real pages from whatever nonexistent pages they’re linking to so you can capture at least part of the link juice they pass.

Improve the anchor text of all incoming links.

Anytime you need to contact a webmaster who’s linking to you, take a look at the anchor text of their link. (The “anchor text” is the word or phrase you can click on to follow the link.) If it doesn’t contain a keyword phrase for the page that it points to, ask them to change what it says so that it does. Keyword rich links can be extremely powerful, as evidenced by our old article on “Google bombing“.

Optimize the internal links on your own website.

Links within your website count for your link popularity, too. It may not be as powerful as external links, but everything adds up to a positive result. Any pages you want to show up in search engine results should be linked from other pages on your own site effectively. Make sure that the navigation on your site is clear and easy to follow and that it includes any pages you’d like to see ranking in the search engines.

Google has announced that they have defused most Google bombs via an algorithmic update. For most sites, this should have no effect. But if you’ve been amused by Google bombs (such as the George Bush Google bomb on “miserable failure”, you may enjoy an extensive blog post by Scott Goodyear. He defines what a Google bomb is, what sites may have to worry in case Google becomes more aggressive about defusing these bombs, and some potential “SEO Karate” that sites may want to use if they’ve been Google Bombed.

Googlebombs are attempts to influence the Google rankings of a page for humorous or political intent. (See a fuller description on Wikipedia.)A famous example was cited in our August 2005 blog: a search for the phrase “miserable failure” brought up the official White House biography of George W. Bush as the first result. That’s because so many people had created links on their web pages that pointed to the President’s biography with link text that said “miserable failure”. Since the technique doesn’t only work on Google, the more generic term for it is a “linkbomb”. David Letterman might call it a “stupid SEO trick”.

Now, it seems that Google is trying to spoil the fun for those pranksters. They’ve modified their algorithm to detect and disregard such Goglebombs. You can read a good overview of this, including lots of blog responses on the Google Operating System blog. If you prefer to get the information straight from the horse’s mouth, you can read Google’s take on it in the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog.

Some are alleging that what other web sites say in their links to you matters more than what’s actually on your web site. I don’t believe that’s completely true, but a couple of recent pranks clearly illustrate the power of link text.

Link text, if you’re not sure, is the text that comprises the actual hyperlink to another web page or web site. In the article below from August 24, the link for Google Talk points to the web page www.google.com/talk/ but it doesn’t say that. It says “Google Talk”. What the link actually says makes a big difference.

You may have heard that if you do a search for “miserable failure” or “worst president”, the #1 result in the search engines is the official biography of President George W. Bush. Try it: go to Google and type in either search term and see what you get.

Now if you go to President Bush’s biography and search it for the word “miserable” or the word “worst”, you’ll find neither one anywhere on the page. How can that be?  Apparently, many bloggers have created links that say “miserable failure” and “worst president” in the link text but which point to President Bush’s biography. So the #1 result you found in Google was driven entirely by link text.

The Moral of the Story

Take this to heart when you’re requesting links to your site. By default, most people giving you links will thoughtlessly give you a link that states your URL, like www.McHughAndMacri.com. That doesn’t help you nearly as much as a link pointing to the same page that says  Elderlaw Attorneys in NewJersey.