How Many Links Do You Need?

Why You Need Links

Every Web site needs links. Without links, people would only find your Web site from offline sources such as your print, radio, and television advertising; word-of-mouth; signs you post around your business; business cards; and business packaging and stationary. While it is important to mention your Web site in as many places as possible, you do want it to be found when people look for sites like yours in search engines.

Search engines find links on Web sites and use those links to find other Web sites. This practice is called "crawling", and the rule of thumb is that the more links there are pointing to your site, the more likely it will be found and indexed by search engines. If you make frequent changes and additions to your site, you want it to be crawled often.

Because of abuse, search engines are now more careful about which sites they crawl and index. Today people talk about "trust", "trusted Web sites", and "trusted links". These are the links positioned on trusted Web sites that (it is believed) search engines aer most likely to follow. New Web sites may take a very long time to appear in search engine results if they don't have many trusted links pointing to them.

How Many Links Do You Need?

There is no magic number of required links. But most Web sites need only a few links, less than 20, in order to be found and indexed. Of course, those links must come from Web sites that have already been indexed. And it is now generally believed that you need more untrusted links than trusted links in order to be easily found in search engine results. The reason is that search engines are less likely to trust Web sites that have only a few untrusted links pointing to them, but they are more likely to trust Web sites that have a mere handful of trusted links pointing at them.

The more difficult it is to get a link from a Web site, the more likely that Web site is to be a trusted resource. This is not always the case, however. Some Web sites have been abandoned, and for lack of links they are no better trusted than many new Web sites. But if a Web site is actively updated, has a large amount of content, and does not easily provide links to other sites, it is most likely a trusted content site.

Your first priority for a new Web site should be to get indexed. It is therefore a good idea to look for 10-20 easily obtained links, usually from free submission directories. After your Web site has been found and indexed by search engines, you should devote more effort to obtaining those hard-to-get links and less effort to obtaining those easy-to-get links.

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