The Politics of Linking on the Web

I build link pages. I do this for myself, for clients, for friends, and occasionally for strangers upon whom I take a pity. A “link page” is no particular thing. It doesn’t necessarily look like THIS or like THAT. It’s a page that exists only for the purpose of linking out. Outbound links are important to the World Wide Web. It’s the links that make it the Web, obviously. I have — for many years now — advocated placing as many outbound links on Websites as possible. The SEO advantages of doing so have been plentiful, and not just because “parts of [Google's] system encourage links to good sites”. Links Are Based Upon Naivete When I built my first Web directory I reviewed thousands of Websites that enthusiastic people submitted for inclusion. Back in those days we had no blogs, no content management systems, and everyone was pretty much ignorant of PHP, Perl, CSS, etc. The time it took people to put together even a 1-page Website might have been considerable, when you allow for the fact that they had to go through an extensive learning process (about basic HTML, Web editing tools, FTP, using an FTP tool, their service [...]



via SEO Theory http://www.seo-theory.com/2013/06/17/the-politics-of-linking-on-the-web/