Guess what?  This post has nothing to do with linking.  So if the idea that LinksManager is pontificating about something other than links makes you a bit queasy, you might want to quit right now.

For the rest of you, the topic for today is websites.  Big Fortune 1000 websites and small business websites, like yours and ours.

– Visit http://www.sony.com/index.php and you’ll find no hint that Sony manufacturers a full line of consumer/business/professional audio and video capture, editing and processing software.  Products such as Sony Sound Forge, Sony Acid, Sony Vegas and Sony DVD Architect are fully the equal of — and in some cases better than — competitors like Abobe Premiere Pro, yet they don’t even appear as a footnote on Sony’s U.S. home page.

– Not to be outdone by its arch rival, Panasonic chooses to host information on its 128- and 256-line corporate PBX phone systems on its consumer electronics website ( http://www2.panasonic.com/consumer-electronics/shop/Business-Phone-Systems/IP-Business-Phone-Systems-(max-256-lines).list.75075_11002_7000000000000005702) where end users are offered a dead shopping cart link and a huge “Learn About It” button that links to the home electronics site’s index page.

– And then there’s Microsoft.com, which contains enough wholly irrelevant content and overall confusion to fill this post — and five or six thick books — all by itself.  We’ll limit ourselves to one example, an attempt to download Windows Media Player 11.

First step was the usual error message telling us we couldn’t download from http://update.microsoft.com via Firefox and would have to either go to http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/default.aspx or use Internet Explorer.

Opting to be brave, we fired up the 64-bit version of IE 8 and eventually (after a great deal of effort) found the Media Player 11 download page.  Clicking on “download now” we were directed to a page informing us that since we were running Windows NT 4 we would only be allowed to download Media Player 6.4.

Clearly, since we were actually running XP 64 Professional, we had some kind of failure to communicate. Undaunted, we decided to press on and see what would happen if we downloaded MP 6.4.  For all we knew, it might just install and immediately offer us an upgrade to the latest version, MP 11.

But, alas no.  It wouldn’t install.  Because, because according to the official Microsoft Update website, our Windows XP computer, which had — according to said official MS Update website — been running Windows NT 4.0 prior to downloading Media Player, had mysteriously shifted to running Windows 2000 after downloading it and Microsoft didn’t offer — according to the update website — a Media Player version for Windows 2000. (This, further research determined, was also total nonsense … Media Player for Windows 2000 has been available for more than six years.)

– You, Steve Jobs!  Stop looking so smug.  We also visited http://www.apple.com/support/ and searched for “iTunes portable player compatibility.”  The first ten returns contained four documents about Xgrid Admin 10.5 (whatever that is), two about Image System Utility, one each about iPhones, Main Stage, OS X and Server Monitor 1.5.5 and not a one explaining that iTunes officially supports only the iPod among current portable players.

– And, finally, the ever wondrous Costco.com, a top contender in every “Worst Website” contest on record, gives you a page of electric barbecues when you search for “electric drill.”  (Never to be outdone, Walmart.com returns hundreds of responses for “electric drill”.  The first 48 of them — all we looked at — offered everything from salad shooters to bicycles but no drills a’tall.)

What’s going on here and at most of the other big-buck, full-time multi-webmaster-staffed super sites that leave so many end users babbling to themselves in frustration?  If you ran your site so cavalierly you’d soon be out business, right?

One answer is that none of the top executives of Fortune 1000 enterprises — and very few of the middle managers directly below them — ever visit their websites.  Which means the people actually tasked with working on those sites know they won’t be held to anything resembling a high standard of accountability.

Another common answer is that top and junior executives do look at their websites, but only at the graphics and Flash and home page text.  Since they never try to find anything on the site or buy anything off it — there is, after all, no way to claim employee discounts in consumer shopping carts — they never actually work with the sites and therefore miss all the functionality and interface flaws.

A third, related, answer, is that Fortune 500/1000 top managers are still largely retro-beings with backgrounds in brick-and-mortar marketing and old-media product presentation.  Therefore, this theory goes, they really have no idea what they’re seeing when they visit any website or what they should be looking for if they want to find out how well it is working.

Any or all of these answers could be correct.  But we believe these idiocies exist because Fortune Whatever sites are owned and operated by Big Business.  Conversely, these kind of really stupid errors can’t be found on your site because you operate a Small Business.  And small businesses — businesses built on the heart, soul and sweat of their owners and their owners’ families rather than government bailouts and foreign investments — have historically been and still are what makes America great.

Or to put it another way, you and us and the tens of millions of other small businesspeople in the U.S. didn’t drag the economy into the merde it’s in today.  The big guys, those Harvard Business School grads who can’t produce a website that knows the difference between “grill” and “drill,” are the ones who did that.

To test this thesis, we checked in with http://www.agmcontainer.com, the internet home of AGM Container Controls, winner of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce 2009 Small Business of the Year Award.  Studying the menu of products and services AGM offers, we selected “tie downs” as the most generic and likely to fool a search engine into providing off-target returns.

We also challenged the AGM site’s search accuracy by deliberately selecting “search for any word” as opposed to search for “all words.” (All the examples above were based on searches for a specific phrase — electric + drill rather than the more general electric or drill.)

Low and behold, the AGM search engine was perfect.  Every return was not only on the topic of tie downs, but related that topic to some aspect of AGM’s tie down business, be it a product description, a catalog download, a FAQ page, etc.

Why are we telling you this?  Because, for what it’s worth, we’d like you to know that we consider you a better business manager than, among others, Rich Waggoner, late of GM, and Vikram Pandit, still clinging to the top spot at CitiGroup after paying himself almost $11 million for (mis)managing the company into sucking up a $45 billion taxpayer bailout in 2008.

And we’re telling you this because we want you to know that we at LinksManager are determined and dedicated, as we have been for more than ten years, to helping you grow your small or mid-sized online business by constantly adding additional value to your subscription by improving old features, adding new ones and streamlining our user interface.

Most of all, we’re telling you this just a few weeks before Father’s Day because 206 years ago, on June 8, 1783, the father of our country, George Washington, officially notified the governors of the 13 original states that online businesses like yours — and ours — “increased the blessings of society.”

Sure, no one, not even an unusually intelligent and perceptive man like Washington, had heard of the Internet back then.  But that’s a technicality.  What GW actually said was that the blessings of society were increased by an “unbounded extension of commerce.”

And if you can think of anything — ever — that has released commerce from as many regional, national, international and logistical bounds as the web, you’re a far, far better thinker than we are.

All website findings / research noted in this post were accurate as of June 1, 2009, so there.

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What if your website was a mouse?  What would it do?  Would it squeak?  And if so, how loud and often?  Or would it stand mute, like a frightened rodent mesmerized by a cat or snake staring it dead in the eyes?

Remember the old adage about the squeaky wheel getting the grease?  If your site was a mouse it would be tremendously to your advantage if it were a cheerful, chatty, endlessly squeaking mouse.  Because squeaky sites — those that can be “heard” over the sight and sound pollution of a hundred thousand other sites — are the ones that get the business.

But, say, what if you woke up one morning and discovered your site had turned into a horn instead of a mouse?  What would you rather it be?  A loud clear bugle of a horn sounding revelry to wake up customers and get them marching toward your shopping cart?  Or a sad, muffled horn vainly trying to puff a few notes past the mute stuffed down its throat?

Good question.  Fortunately for us, there is an authoritative answer to it.

“If you do happen to have a horn,” a certain expert on electoral bugle calls (and squeaky political wheels, for that matter) once said, “you’d be best advised to pick it up and start blowing it … because you can be damned sure no one else is going to blow it for you.”

Considering that the author of that quote, former President Lyndon Johnson, blew his own horn all the way  to the White House, it’s probably fair to consider his opinion on the subject definitive.

What we’re saying with all these references to mice and horns and relentlessly self-promoting politicians is that if the three most important elements in a brick-and-mortar store’s success are location, location and location, the three equivalent factors in e-tailing are visibility, visibility and visibility.

Regardless of business model, irrespective of whether a store has plaster walls or virtual ones, people have to find it before they can shop in it.  That’s why location has always been so critical to success in traditional marketing, stores in good locations are easier for customers to find.  They are especially easier for customers to stumble upon.

And we’re not just talking about small, local or specialty stores here.  There’s a reason why giants such as WalMart and Best Buy spend big bucks to locate stores where they are highly visible from a freeway or other major road.  The executives at these chains know that their customers will — like bargain-seeking missiles — find their stores even if they are a bit off the beaten track, but that’s not the point.  They want more than that.  They want people driving down the freeway to say “Oh, there’s WalMart, let’s stop and use the restroom” (and wind up buying a bunch of stuff while we’re there.)

The same logic applies to how the big boys operate on the web.  Amazon is the biggest, best AND most profitable e-tailer (profitable not always being synonymous with “biggest” and “best” in the online world) in part because it maintains a huge (and hugely expensive) affiliate network.  Go to sports sites, cooking sites, home improvement sites and sites in dozens of other categories and you’re highly likely to find references to books, manuals and DVDs that shunt you right onto Amazon as soon as you click them.

So what’s a small business e-tailer to do?

Clearly, the number one priority — after you build your first-class, end-user friendly and informative site — is to try and get the best search engine position you can by making full use of all the legitimate, effective, proven SEO tools — keyword optimization, relevant reciprocal linking, site maps, alt. text on graphics, etc. — available to you.  Conversely, you must avoid the unethical, search-engine spam temptations — fully automated linking schemes, doorway pages, hidden text, page redirects, etc. — offered for sale all over the web.

All that done, there is still the grim reality that traffic from search engines falls off drastically if you’re not in the first 10-30 returns for the key search terms related to your business.  (If you are in the first 10 or 20 returns, quit reading right now and just go on doing what you’re doing.)

Which leaves something like 98 percent of the world’s websites buried almost as deep in the Google gulag as if they’d been sandboxed. (A lot of people will be shocked at that kind of talk, but it’s true. In practical terms — i.e. sales generated — return positions like 397, 998, 2475, or 50,754 are no more useful than none at all.)

So what’s the answer?

Mice and horns.  Squeaks and toots.  In other words, links.

A top ten return on Google is a scream.  A yell.  A bellow.  A steamship whistle.  The last sound you hear under the forming mushroom cloud after the big one drops.  The sound of a top ten search return is a big sound that can turn thousands of heads toward your website.

A mouse squeak, one lone note from a bugle … they’re wee sounds, the kind of a sound that a single link on a single website makes.  The kind of sound that may only be heard by five or ten or 20 or 100 people.  But of those five or ten or 20 or 100 people, the majority are very likely to be interested in what your site has to offer because they’ve “heard” your sound on a known, trusted website which has content on topics related to your content.

Ten links, 100 links, 1000 links squeaking out your URL equals the sound of many mice indeed.  A sound loud enough to drive a healthy, continuous stream of interested, qualified sales prospects through the door of your virtual shop.

But the best thing about these little sounds is that you’re the noisemaker.  Creating a roaring Google top-ten-return atomic blast requires, as does triggering any other nuclear weapon, use of a complex decryption key possessed only by the system administrator.  To use Lyndon Johnson’s analogy, making the sound of a top-ten return requires that somebody else — in this case Google — pick up your horn and blow it for you. And the odds are better than 10,000 to one that Google will not be inclined to do that.

How many mice you deploy and where you station them to squeak, however, is entirely under your control. Using LinksManager you can, slowly and steadily in compliance with search engine guidelines on organic link growth, establish mice and horn colonies throughout cyberspace.  Each of them working, in their small, quiet way, to popularize your site and make it more visible to the people who matter most — potential customers.

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Can the data in Google’s monthly statistical summaries of what people are searching for and where they expect to find it be of any value in improving your search engine ranking?

Probably not.  But there is, however slight, a small chance you could use Google Trends and Google Insights to help restructure your site’s content, link categories and other elements to make them a bit more productive in generating good return position.

Moreover, we knew a headline implying they could “improve your return position” would get your attention and we think Google’s analytic packages are something you should be interested in even if they don’t have any immediate benefit for your particular situation.

As the late B.C. Forbes says on top of the quotes page in every issue of Forbes magazine, “with all thy getting, get understanding.”  If Google’s helpful — and FREE!!! — online search tracking and comparison applets don’t give you a better understand of what web surfers are seeking, nothing will.

Google Trends and Google Insights are, as you probably know, essentially two ways to look at the same numbers.  Trends, which has recently been upgraded with some cool “beta” features like an option to show search volume on a map, came along first.  Insights, the younger brother is a bit more flexible and fully featured.

In their most basic form. both programs chart mathematically weighted totals of the number of searches for a given word (or term) relative to the total number of all Google searches broken down by time period, geography, category and, depending on which program you’re using, a host of other factors.  More importantly, they let you enter multiple words or terms and produce comparative charts showing what we will call, for lack of a better phrase, their relative search appeal.

Let’s take a look at a typical Trends screen showing relative international search volume for Ford, GM and Honda over the past 12 months. As we see, Ford and Honda trounce GM.

When we look at just Ford and GM’s home state of Michigan, however, we see much less of a gap between Ford and GM and a significant decline in the relative number of searches for Honda.  Note: The lower chart on the Trends screens indicate the number of times each search word appeared in Google News stories.  Not surprisingly, GM, which has been flirting with bankruptcy and government bailout funds while Honda and Ford have not, has a substantial lead in the newsmaker sweepstakes.

Now, lets’ move along to Google Insights and just for fun, swap Toyota for Honda.

Here we have the relative automotive category search popularity of the three carmakers internationally. Ford with a slight edge over Toyota and both way past GM. But take a look at what happens when you change the category from “automotive” to “finance and insurance.”

Suddenly, GM charges into the lead.  If you are fond of black humor, you could call that one of the real perks of being insolvent.

So, can these “things” — Google Trends and Google Insights — help you build a better, more search-engine friendly and end-user attractive — website?  As we said at the beginning, that’s arguable and some of the most knowledgeable people in the world on the subject argue that they can’t.

In an April 10 research document, for example, Google Chief Economist Hal Varian, and Decision Support Engineering Analyst Hyunyoung Choi state:

We are not claiming that Google Trends data help predict the future.  Rather we are claiming that Google Trends may help in predicting the present.  For example, the volume of queries on a particular brand of automobile during the second week in June may be helpful in predicting the June sales report for that brand, when it is released in July.

If “predicting the present,” whatever that means, were the only things Trends and Insights could do we’d be out of luck.  Knowing what people are searching for today and changing our sites to reflect that isn’t go to help our returns tomorrow.  Fortunately, Google’s free analytics can show us a lot more than that.

Because they do, as the name of the first service implies, track trends … trends going back four years.  And those trends can, despite what Google says, provide reasonable — if obviously not infallible — insights into the future.

Here, for instance, is a chart comparing the search popularity of four dog breeds — Dobermans, Scottish Terriers, Collies and Golden Retrievers — over 48 months.  The Collies and the Goldens have a clear lead over the Dobies and all three substantially lead the Scotties.

But that’s not the important part.  The important part is that the results have been pretty darn consistent for four solid years.  What does this tell you if you sell pet supplies on the web?  It could — and we stress the “could” — tell you that adding sub or full categories for “Collies” and “Golden Retrievers” on your links pages might — and we stress “might” — help your returns.  As might adding those breeds to the anchor text of links with dog-oriented sites.

Example: Changing “treats, toys and training tools for all breeds of dogs” to “treats, toys and training tools for all breeds of dogs including collies and golden retrievers.”

It might also tell you that it would be a good idea to add those two breeds to your home page keywords and reference them more frequently than you do other breeds in your content.  Or that, absent any other reason for picking a particular dog’s photo to illustrate one of your pages, you should use one of a Collie with alt.text that says something like “Collies and Golden Retrievers love to shop here.”

Note: Though it doesn’t change the rankings any, substituting “Scottie” for “Scottish Terrier” does up the line for that breed, indicating you should use both variations on your site if you refer to the breed at all.

Almost done.  Just one more chart to go.  Ready?

Ah, sports. Note the big seasonal peaks for football and, to a lesser extent, basketball.  Not to argue with the Google scientists, but you don’t have to be Nostradamus to predict the future from this four-year chart.  Refining it down to a 12-month view (not illustrated) you will find that football far out draws the other three sports every September, October and November.

Since anything is theoretically possible, that could change this year.  But it’s not terribly likely.  So that future forecast says you can improve the timeliness and freshness of the incoming links to your sporting goods site by adding football content to your LinkBlogs starting in July.

Google Trends and Insights.  They’re sort of like unshelled oysters and crab legs.  Not much of a meal for the lazy.  But if you’ve got the energy and perseverance to crack them open, you’re in for one hell of a treat.

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Here’s a fun idea.  Let’s have a simple, five-question pop quiz.

1. Who very recently said:  I’m about to publish a blog post with a ton of links in it — almost two hundred of them.
a.) Bill Clinton
b.) Barack Obama
c.) George H.W. Bush
d.) A top Google executive who may still harbor hopes of growing up to be president
e.) None of the above

2. Who very recently said:  Does Google automatically consider a page spam if your page has over 100 links? No, not at all.
a.) Bill Gates
b.) Warren Buffet
c.) Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa
d.) A top Google executive who is not (yet) one of the richest men in the world
e.) None of the above

3. Who very recently said:  Pages with lots of links are not automatically considered spammy by Google.
a.) Janet Jackson
b.) Phil Jackson
c.) Jesse Jackson
d.) A top Google executive who is not now and never has been named Jackson
e.) None of the above

4. Who very recently said: I wouldn’t be surprised if search engines begin to take stronger action against link buying in the near future.
a.) Arnold Schwarzenegger
b.) Terminator 3
c.) Conan the Barbarian
d.) A top Google executive who has so far successfully resisted entering the Mr. Universe contest.
e.) None of the above

Well, guess what? If you picked “D” on all four questions — and you almost certainly did — you’ve just earned an A+ or, to put it numerically, a perfect score of 100 percent.

Yes, all those statements were recently brought done the mountain from Google’s castle in the sky by none other than Matt Cutts, who is neither as presidential as the other contenders in Question 1, as wealthy as those in Question 2, as Jacksonian as those in Question 3, or as steroidal as the hulks in Question 4.

Still, in his own realm as head of das Google Spamgendarmerie (as the governor of California might put it) Matt C is not only more powerful than a speeding super hero, he’s more feared than a Machivillian nightmare.

In other words, Matt’s every utterance on the subject of what does and doesn’t influence Google PageRank and return position invariably hits the SEO and webmaster community with all the oomph of multi-zillion-buck stimulus package landing on an investment banker’s private airstrip.

In the interests of full disclosure, we have to admit that here at LinksManager we’re big fans of the Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO blog.  Not because he always agrees with us about the pressing issues of the linking day, which he doesn’t, but because he generally has well-thought out, intelligent reasons when he does question our omnipotence.

What the Big C does is take an arguable position, thus enabling us to argue about it, to point out why we think he’s wrong (not that it ever does us any good.)

But compare that with the “position” of the Chicken Little SEO Crowd, which drags its dried up, gnarly claws through the pea gravel waving its stunted wings in the air and squawking about how the sky is absolutely, positively going to fall if every webmaster in the world doesn’t stop linking and engaging in other perfectly ethical, fully search engine-compliant, site-promotion practices.

Like, how do you argue with that?  You can try “links have been the skeletal support, nervous system, and major arteries of the web since Tim Berners-Lee invented it and the sky hasn’t fallen so far.”  But they’d just cackle something like “of course it hasn’t fallen yet, but it’s going to.  Just look up at it, can’t you see how much closer to earth it is today than it was yesterday?”

End of discussion.  What can you say beside “actually, duh, no, A-hole, it looks exactly the same to me.”  But that’s not a debate point, it’s an opinion.

Getting back to Matt Cutts, the other reason we generally like his blog is that he does, in fact, agree with us much more often than he disagrees.

Over the course of scores of posts he has repeatedly affirmed the importance of link exchanging to a properly ordered World Wide Web.  He has stated and restated that Google does not penalize sites for featuring a robust slate of organic, relevant links.  And he has criticized the same types of link spam — paid links, link farm links, automated linking schemes, etc. — that we have been warning you about for more than ten years.

Perhaps most importantly, he has continually rebutted BS rumors that Google no longer considers quality links as a positive factor in ranking pages.

The most recent of these rebuttals came this month March 2009, just a few days before this post was written.  In a blog entry posted that day (from which three of our four opening “test questions” were taken), Matt wrote that “If you end up with hundreds of links on a page … you’re dividing the PageRank of that page between hundreds of links, so each link is only going to pass along a minuscule amount of PageRank … ”

That’s pretty clear.  It says that high-quality links pages can attain good page ranks and favorably impact the page rank of sites linked to them — but not if that PR is squandered by having too many links on each links page.

Matt also goes on to point out that “users often dislike link-heavy pages” and recommends that “before you go overboard putting a ton of links on a page, ask yourself what the purpose of the page is and whether it works well for the user experience.”

If you are a regular (or even occasional) visitor to this blog, the Linking School or the LinksManager FAQs, you probably recognize that phrase “works well for the user experience” as a key part of our mantra as well.

Indeed, in his post Matt Cutts answered the question “How Many Links Per Page” by quoting a Google Design and Content Guideline recommendation to “keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).”  No wonder we like Matt’s blog so much, that’s the maximum number we’ve been recommending for years, most recently in a November blog entry here.

Which gives us a great opportunity to put another bogus horror story out of its (and possibly your) misery.  Despite what you may have heard, despite what some $300-an-hour SEO consultants might tell you to justify their invoices, the Google Design and Content Guidelines have absolutely nothing — ABSOLUTELY NOTHING — to do with whether a site gets indexed or de-indexed, whether it has a PR of 10 or Zero, whether it returns on the first page of a search query or the 800th.

The Design and Content Guidelines, most of which are totally admirable, are strictly Google’s attempt to help you build a good site, they are not mandates or requirements and it’s doubtful that Googlebot even knows they exist.

Let us once again quote from Mr. Cutts (the emphasis, however, is ours):  Does Google automatically consider a page spam if your page has over 100 links?  No, not at all.  The “100 links” recommendation is in the “Design and content” guidelines section, and it’s the Quality guidelines that contain the things that we consider webspam (stuff like hidden text, doorway pages, installing malware, etc.).

OK, Matt, here’s what you’ve taught us today.

You’ve taught us that quality links still play a positive SEO role.

You’ve taught us there’s nothing wrong with having lots of links as long they’re ethically obtained, relevant, displayed properly and posted over a reasonable time period.

You’ve taught us that links pages — just like every other site element — should be created with end-user friendliness and benefits in mind.

You’ve taught us that ignoring Google’s Quality Guidelines is playing with fire, but that we can use or abuse its Design and Content Guidelines with impunity.

Most of all, you’ve taught us that you, Matt Cutts, the one and only director of Google’s Webspam Team, probably won’t be putting all 200 of the links in your upcoming blog onto the same page.

So, what’s question number 5?

5. Someone recently said:  If I say something stupid in the future, it’s better to be able to point out that the stupidity is mine, and mine alone.  My stupidity!  You can’t have it!
a.) Donald Trump
b.) Tyra Banks
c.) Ryan Seacrest
d.) A top Google executive whose doesn’t host a reality show (but does specialize in reality checks)
e.) None of the Above.

(The correct answer is still D)

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The traditional, time-proven, easy as 1-2-3 method of establishing a one-on-one link goes something like this.  In Step One, you use one of a myriad of techniques to find a quality prospective linking partner, a site which is complementary and relevant to yours.

Step Two involves sending the webmaster or owner of that site a link exchange request.

In Step Three, the other site operator either accepts your invitation to link and you execute the link, or the other site operator declines your request and you both move on to the next item on your probably over-stuffed agendas.

The process is simple, straightforward and very time efficient, especially if you use LinksManager’s customizable link request form to solicit links and Suggest Link Form to manage incoming link requests.

One-two-three.  That’s the process involved in initiating somewhere around 98 or 99 percent of natural, ethical (as opposed to paid or spammy) link exchanges.

Sometimes, however, a relatively new roadblock is created right in the middle of Step Three.  Whether or not that new element advances or retards the process of executing a robust, productive linking strategy is definitely debatable and something you may eventually have to decide for yourself upon being confronted with it.

That element or, if you will, roadblock, is called a linking contract.

Lets back up to Step Two, the one where you send a webmaster a link request.  In Step Three, he accepts or rejects it.  That’s the standard way link exchanges have always worked and is the way they still work in the vast majority of cases.

In a few instances, however, a webmaster will respond to a link request by saying “I’d love to link to your site, but you have to sign a linking contract (or agreement) first.”

And there’s your roadblock, a demand that you negotiate and execute a legal document before engaging in one of the most common, essential, and integral actions involved in keeping the Web living, breathing and growing — establishing a hyperlink.

Enough theory. S hould you agree to a linking contract if presented with one?  Or start demanding them yourself?

Frankly, we can’t offer any answers to those questions.  All contracts are different and the degree to which you want and need one — or think you do — is known only to you.  More importantly, we are neither lawyers nor qualified to give legal advice.

We can, however, give our opinion of the kind of people who think they need a legally binding contract or agreement to cover something as free, transparent and easily terminated as a link exchange.

IOO (in our opinion) most of them can be described in one word: Anal.

How anal?

Perhaps the best way to answer that is by quoting Section 8.2 of a typical eight-page, jargon-bedazzled “Reciprocal Website Link Agreement” currently being sold online.

8.12 Force Mideure. In the event that either party is unable to perform any of its obligations under this Agreement or to enjoy any of its benefits because of any Act of God, strike, fire, flood, governmental acts, orders or restrictions, Internet system unavailability, system malfunctions or any other reason where failure to perform is beyond the reasonable control and not caused by the negligence of the non¬performing party (a “Force Majeure Event”), the party who has been so affected shall give notice immediately to the other party and shall use its reasonable best efforts to resume performance. Failure to meet due dates resulting from a Force Majeure Event shall extend such due dates for a reasonable period. However, if the period of nonperformance exceeds sixty (60) days from the receipt of notice of the Force Majeure Event, the party whose ability to perform has not been affected may, by giving written notice, terminate this Agreement effective immediately upon such notice or at such later date as is therein specified.

Would you try to wade through nearly 3,000 words of this legal jibber-jabber just to establish a link?

Do you feel an overwhelming need to include topics like inadequate legal remedies, arbitration, delay is not a waiver, governing law and jurisdiction, no representation regarding traffic, limited license, obligations and agreements, independent contractors, solicitation of employees for hire and a dozen or so others in a link-request email?

Are you a bit queasy at the thought of not having a written contract specifying that “clicking” shall mean to press down and release the computer mouse button thereby selecting the onscreen object on which the user clicks?

We hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if you answered “yes” to the above three questions — all based on actual, unedited boilerplate from a pay-for-play downloadable linking contract — you’re not just anal. You’re hyper-anal.  Uber-anal.  So anal you should totally block access to your site.  You might not make any money if the site’s inaccessible, but at least none of those pesky end users will be able to get in and steal something.

Just kidding.  We’ll try to be serious now, at least for the rest of this blog.

There probably are, in some cases, real and valid reasons for executing a formal linking contract, particularly if you’re the owner or webmaster of a Fortune 500 company’s website with a trade name and intellectual property valued in seven or eight figures.  But if you’re in that position you’re going to be using a proprietary agreement that specifically addresses your issues, not an off-the-shelf, fill-in-the-blanks form.

IOO, again, about 99 percent of the good reciprocal links on the web would not benefit from formal contracts between their owners.  Even worse, a substantial number — maybe even a majority — of those links would never have been implemented if such a contract had been tossed into the initiation process by either of the webmasters.

As we said, that’s just our opinion.  But it’s backed by the billions of active non-contracted links that form the heart, soul, blood vessels and nervous system of the web.

Establishing a link is — or should be — entirely about mutual benefits.  A good link provides equal value to the site operator on each end of the link and to their end users.  Creating a linking camapign that works for you, your link partners, your customers, your search engine rankings and the web at large is an organic, intuitive process.  It is not something easily done from within a straightjacket.

And contracts, particularly those with verbiage like “each party agrees to offer and maintain Customer Service operations for their respective sites which shall include telephone customer service during normal business hours” (whatever those are in the global 24/7 e-commerce community), are straightjackets.

If, after reading this far, you think we believe that eight-page documents with more words and deliberately twisted language than contracts used to sell cars and condos have little to less-than-zero place in the link-exchange world, you’re absolutely right.

But that doesn’t mean we’re against setting some less formal ground rules between prospective link partners.  Quite the contrary.  There are numerous occasions when a simple email iterating some specifics about a particular link could be useful, even if only to refresh one or the other partner’s memory at some point in the future.

For a “how-to” on writing such an email of understanding, check out this newly released article How To Structure A Gentleperson’s Linking Agreement in the Linking School.

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Are we really, as the government and Big Business would like us to think, in a recession?  Or is the current economic spiral something more serious, ominous and possibly longer lasting than the average, run-of-the-mill, periodic recession or market readjustment?

Consider these items:

– Major financial institutions on the order of Washington Mutual, Wachovia, and Citibank have not almost simultaneously tanked since 1929-30.

– Likewise, core companies like Ford and GM have never skated this close to bankruptcy since the last Great Depression.

– Nearly ten percent of the American workforce is currently unemployed.  During the deepest part of the Great Depression, which was three or four years after the 1929 market crash, the number barely reached 14 percent.

– On what might eventually go down in history as Black Monday, January 27, 2009, American employers announced plans to fire between 55,000 and 70,000 workers (depending on which news source one believed.)  Either number qualifies as a modern-era one-day record.

– Chain-store bankruptcies and liquidations are at an all time high.

– GM is far from alone in posting staggering losses.  Though significantly less than GM’s estimated $1 billion-a-month hemorrhaging, companies like Delta Airlines and Phillips Electronics, with losses of over $500 million a month in Q4 2008, are not exactly rolling in clover.  Nor is their financial performance that atypical.

– E-business is not immune.  Roughly 10,000 people who were getting checks from Google last Halloween are not getting them any more.  And while Google disputes labor organization claims that these people were employees, the fact remains that they were getting paid to perform services and now they’re not.  Meanwhile, Q4 earnings at eBay were off 31 percent.  Even gaming giant EA is faltering, though their situation is apparently not so bleak that they had to include football folk hero John Madden, with his multi-gizillion-dollar contract, in the 10 percent of their workforce being pink slipped.

So regardless of whether you label it a recession, a depression, a market adjustment, a catastrophe, or simply deep doodoo, the economic environment at this particular moment in time means that all but a relative handful of very fortunate business people are having to search longer to find, and fight harder to land, new customers.

At the same time, most businesses are facing sales and profit declines that make it almost impossible to start expensive new marketing campaigns or even maintain existing ones.

To expand that point, let’s look at a very simple, round-numbered, pre-crash/post-crash scenario.

MyCompanyHopesToSurvive.com Paid Search Results December 15-January 15, 2008

1000 hits @ $1 each, total cost: $1000
200 sales from hits averaging $100 each, total revenue: $20000
Average profit margin, 25%
Gross Profit: $5000
ROI on $1000 paid-linking program: $4000

MyCompanyHopesToSurvive.com Paid Search Results December 15-January 15, 2009

1000 hits @ $1 each, total cost: $1000
100 sales from hits averaging $70 each, total revenue: $7000
Average profit margin, 17%
Gross Profit: $1190
ROI on $1000 paid-linking program: $100

OK, the current-year numbers aren’t very good, but they could be worse.  At least MyCompanyHopesToSurvive.com isn’t in the red, which is more than many companies can say.  On the other hand, MCHTS’s mythical operator probably isn’t dining out very often these days.

Though you may find it hard to believe after reading all this, we’re really not trying to depress you with an unremitting load of doom and gloom here.  Prosperity may not be just around the corner, but it is out there somewhere and most of us will, somehow, live to see it.

What we are trying to point out is that we’re currently living in hard times and that historically, in all communities ancient and modern, the best and most effective way to get through bad periods is by leaning on each other and together fighting our way toward a better tomorrow.

Those of us doing business on the web are part of the e-commerce community, a community — like all business communities right now — which has many members who are hurting and a significant number who are seriously at risk.

To get through the next months, or perhaps years, of decreased consumer spending and belt tightening, we have to link hands and pull together.  Except that in cyberspace there are no hands to hold, so we have to link sites instead.

Linking today is still, as it always has been, the most cost effective and widely practiced way of attracting qualified (i.e. interested in the product) potential customers to a website.  What’s changed from the “old days” (like even six months ago) is that the value proposition offered by reciprocal link exchanging is now more compelling than ever.

Ethical reciprocal linking is still the only way to promote your website without any risk of losing either money, or search-engine ranking.

Hey, that’s so important let’s repeat it in boldface.

Ethical reciprocal linking, such as that enabled by LinksManager and detailed in our FAQs, user guides and linking school articles, is still the only way to promote your website without any risk of losing either money or search-engine ranking.

Paid search, banner ads, display ads, newspaper ads, public relations campaigns, even printing up business cards … all those things cost money.  And if they fail to generate business, or don’t generate enough business to cover their cost, you’ve lost real dollars.

A link between your site and another site can fail completely, fall flat on its virtual face, never generate a single sale … and it still won’t have cost you a dime.  And chances are it will still be active when business improves and will, at that time, finally start driving sales to your site.

That’s something else paid campaigns can’t deliver.  Once they’re over and the money has been flushed, they can’t come back to help you.  They have to be paid for and relaunched all over again, assuming you’re still in business.

Everything considered, now might be an excellent time to re-evaluate your linking program and think of ways to expand it by adding links or categories, changing some home page links to deep links, improving your anchor text or adding special features like LinkBlogs and Linklets.

And if you have any friends who are looking for ways to promote their sites without going nuts or into debt, please let them know they can experience the force of linking without cost or commitment by taking advantage of our 30-day free trial.

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Year after year, decade after decade, early 21st Century after late 20th Century, the LinksManager Helpdesk receives questions about “footprints,” bits and bytes of embedded code that enable web pages to do certain things essential to their functionality.

Footprint itself, in this context, is pretty much an informal term.  There is no precise definition of a code “footprint” as there is, for example, for a page “footprint,” which is the size of the files comprising the page and an indication of how long it will take the page to open in a browser at any given download speed.

Most commonly, however, code fragments that receive the footprint designation invoke an automated action involving data collection or transmission.  When you click the “submit” button on most online forms, for example, the code or script that organizes what you inputted into the form and transmits it to the form manager is often referred to as a footprint because it — in a certain sense — creates a trail between your computer and the form’s host.

Likewise, code that automatically “harvests” information about an end user or an end user’s computer is also frequently identified as a footprint.  Does that make such footprints evil?

No.  Absolutely not.

If you answered “yes” it was probably because we deliberately baited you by using the word “harvests,” which has a negative connotation because programs designed to invade people’s computers to unethically (and frequently illegally) collect personal information have long been referred to as “harvesting” applications.

Yet the great majority of computer “harvests” are performed for perfectly legitimate reasons.

You may not, to cite one example, be best pleased by Microsoft XP’s harvesting information about your latest CPU or motherboard upgrade and demanding that you revalidate your OS, but there is nothing illegal, immoral or fattening about MS doing it.  It is simply annoying, stupid, deliberately infuriating and a classic example of the arrogance displayed by the rulers of all declining empires throughout recorded history.

Likewise, most tracking cookies — like those which enable automatic logons to subscription and other secure sites — are not attempts to steal your soul, their actual purpose is to make your life easier or, in other cases, collect generic, non-identifiable usage data designed to help businesses refine their sales programs and application developers improve their programs.

As long as end users are given the opportunity to opt out of storing their passwords or contributing their data, there is nothing wrong with any of these automated routines or, if you prefer, footprints.

So, why is this somewhat esoteric subject a chronic source of LinksManager Helpdesk inquiries?

Because footprints are yet another of the seemingly endless series of straw men that search engine optimization (SEO) flim-flam artists set up and knock down in an attempt to prove they are — in the absence of improved return positions, which is the only SEO analytic that matters — providing something of value to their customers.

The patter goes like this:

1. Footprints enable automation.

2. Google considers automated web routines bad and invokes an “ignore” command that prevents Googlebot from indexing pages that contain them.

3. LinksManager-generated links page contain footprints and won’t, therefore, be indexed.

To set the record straight, let’s work backward from number three.

Like tens of millions of other sites, LinksManager uses a “post” footprint to allow users’ forms to communicate with our servers.  Next to static “mailto” and “get”, which are one-way methods for retrieving information, “post”, which allows for dynamic updating and storage of data, is the web’s most common method for implementing forms.

“Post’s” purposes and specifications are clearly detailed in past and current HTML standards and do not in any way or form violate Google or any other search engine’s guidelines or recommendations.

LinksManager can also add an optional tracking footprint to your link pages to count the number of hits each of your links receives and rank them in popularity.  This footprint is also completely search-engine neutral, but if you’re worried about it you can disable it completely via a drop-down menu in the Top Link Lists section of your LinksManager Control Panel.

The truth is that Google not only indexes most LinksManager links pages, it even assigns PageRank to many of them.  If your links pages are not yet indexed by Google, it doesnt mean they are not being factored into your rankings. 

Consider http://atcmonitor.com/atcresources which has a PR of 3 and happens to be the links page on one of our parent company’s sites, ATCMonitor.com, which offers live monitoring of the skies above Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, the world’s busiest passenger air terminal.

To truly appreciate how significant a Google of Page Rank of three for a “mere” links page actually is and how it totally debunks the claim that LinksManager-created pages won’t be indexed, let alone ranked, we need a standard of measurement.  Since ATCmonitor.com gives live radar and audio from the Atlanta Hartsfield control tower let’s Google “Atlanta Control Tower.”

Hhhhmmm, the ATCMonitor home page returns #1 and has a PageRank of 4.  Of the nine other returns on the first page, only two — count ‘em, two — equal the PR of 3 earned by ATCMonitor’s LinksManager-empowered links page, footprints and all.  The other seven top returns all have PRs of zero to two.

So much for the BS about LinksManager links pages not being indexed.  As it does with every other web page, Google bases its indexing and ranking decisions on content, not on the software used to create the page.

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Inspector Gregory:
“Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
“That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.
“The Adventure of Silver Blaze” by Arthur Conan Doyle

Our last post discussed several Microsoft Live documents stressing the importance and beneficial nature of white-hat linking in earning positive search engine rankings.  In that post, we noted we would next comment on the November release of version 1.1 of Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.  Here goes.

In the proverbial nutshell, this is what the biggest dog in the search engine universe had to say about reciprocal linking in its first official document on search engine optimzation (SEO) practices:  Essentially nothing.

Perhaps “curiously” to those who have read the RLLs (Reciprocal Linking Lies) peddled by the kind of over-priced, under-performing, self-anointed search-engine optimization “consultants” which Google elsewhere says have ” have given the industry a black eye,” GoogleDog didn’t bark at linking.  It didn’t growl. I t didn’t snap.  It didn’t threaten to consign ethical linkers to the seventh ring of hell.

On the contrary, what the Google SEO Guide does say about linking pretty much parallels many of the things LinksManager, in this blog, on our website and in the Linking School, has been saying for years.

Things like increasing the number of your links “gradually,” avoiding “purchasing links from another site with the aim of getting PageRank instead of traffic,” and refraining from “spamming link requests out” wholesale.

Far from criticizing linking, the Google SEO Guide actually gives a few tips for making your links more effective and useful to both end users and Googlebot.

For example, the Guide advises webmasters to “format links so they’re easy to spot.  Your content,” it goes on to say, “becomes less useful if users miss the links or accidently click them … avoid using CSS or text styling that makes the links look just like regular text.”

Sound complicated?  Or maybe just irritating and time consuming?  Not to fret, LinksManager’s easy-to-use, intuitive Cosmetic Controls automatically formats your links to attractively engage site visitors’ attention without being mistaken for regular text, headlines or any other site attribute.

The Google SEO Guide also offers extensive suggestions for optimizing your anchor text for both human viewers and search-engine robots.

“Avoid using excessively keyword-filled or lengthy anchor text just for search engines,” it advises, reiterated Google’s long-stated position that the best way to optimize pages for Googlebot is to design them to maximize end user benefits.

(As an example that LinksManager and Google really do share much of the same philosophy about linking, here’s a similar quote from a Linking School article published long before Google issued its SEO guide: Search engines frown on keyword stuffing whether it appears in home page copy, articles or link text.

Other anchor text “dos” and “don’ts” cited by Google include:

– Do make sure anchor text “accurately describes the content” of the link

– Don’t write “generic anchor text like ‘page’, ‘article’, or ‘click here’ ”

– Do write “short but descriptive text”

– Don’t use “text that is off-topic or has no relation to the page linked to”

– Don’t link to “sites that Google considers spammy” because “it can affect the reputation of your own site.” (How many thousands of times over the past decade have we said precisely that?)

“The better your anchor text is,” the Guide says, “the easier it is for users to navigate to and for Google to understand what the page you’re linking to is about.”

Finally or, more accurately initially since it is at the very beginning of the Guide, Google says this: Even though this guide’s title contains the words “search engine”, we’d like to say that you should base your optimization decisions first and foremost on what’s best for the visitors of your site.  They’re the main consumers of your content and are using search engines to find your work.

Another quote echoes that sentiment: By staying focused on linking for the end user, your website will increase in value, and naturally rise in the search engine rankings as a result.

The main difference between those two quotes?  The latter isn’t in the Google Guide, it’s part of the LinksManager FAQ section … where it has resided for years.

So the next time someone tries to tell you that Google and the ethical linking community in general and LinksManager in particular aren’t on the same page, tell them to crawl off into a cave somewhere and memorize Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide … right after they get done soaking their head.

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The search engines are reading our minds!  Or maybe they’ve finally started reading all our LinksManager.com blog posts and Linking School articles.

Consider these two direct quotes:

Links are what search engines such as MSN Search/Windows Live Search, Google, and Yahoo use to determine how popular your Web site is, and where to place it in their page rankings.

– Microsoft Live Small Business How To Get Links To Your Site

If you want lots of visitors to your Web site, it helps to have lots of links to your Web site.  Link exchanges — sometimes called reciprocal linking or link swaps — are a popular way to generate more links.

– Skip Chilcott, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft Office Live Small Business

Since that’s what we always say, they must have copied it from us, right?  Fat chance.

Much as our egos hate to admit it, Google and Microsoft have probably just gotten tired of their true positions on linking being twisted, distorted and misrepresented by black-hat, shade-tree search-engine mechanics and have decided to do something about it.

Whatever the reason, Google, with the release of its first-ever official SEO Starter Guide and Microsoft, in both an official Live Office web page and a senior product manager’s blog, have apparently taken a long look at the type of ethical, editor-based reciprocal linking strategy on which LinksManager is based and found it a valid site-building tool.

In many instances, actually, the documents quoted above strongly support the contention that relevant two-way linking improves a site’s search engine position and is an essential element in properly marketing and branding a website.

Since the Google Guide deals with the entire spectrum of SEO practices and the Microsoft documents are specific to linking, we’ll discuss Microsoft’s pronouncements on link exchanges now and the Google Guide in our next post.

Site Visibility

No question about it , Microsoft agrees with us and just about every other internet veteran who’s watched the web grow from a gleam in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye to the most omnipresent and powerful information medium in history:  Linking is an essential element in attracting visitors to a site.

The Microsoft How To Get Links To Your Site page is totally direct and out front on this, stating that “your business may have the most finely crafted, informative, and useful Web site ever, but it won’t do you much good if no one can find it.  That’s why you need to know about links.  They’re what guide users from one Web site to another.”

“And just as important,” the Microsoft document continues, “links are what search engines such as MSN Search/Windows Live Search, Google, and Yahoo use to determine how popular your Web site is, and where to place it in their page rankings.”

Reciprocal Linking & Link Exchanges

In his blog, Microsoft Live Small Business Senior Product Manager Steve Chilcott advises that “if you want lots of visitors to your web site, it helps to have lots of links to your web site” and says that “link exchanges — sometimes called reciprocal linking or link swaps — are a popular way to generate more links.”

Chilcott adds that reciprocal linking is, as we’ve always said, “a pretty simple concept.”  Using a hypothetical veterinarian seeking and obtaining a link from an equally hypothetical pet store site as an example, he notes that the link swap “works well” because the two site operators have “complementary, noncompetitive businesses that target the same audience: pet owners.”

OK, stop right here.  Sit down and take a deep breath, wrap your fist around a cold one if you’re that kind of person.  (Maybe a magnum of Dom P or Cristal would be more appropriate.)  Most of all listen up.  Here’s something else Chilcott wrote in one of his November blogs:  Reciprocal links help drive traffic from my site to your site and vice versa.  They also HELP US BOOST OUR RANKINGS IN SEARCH ENGINES.

Thank you, Mr. Chilcott.  For more than 10 years we’ve been preaching that quality, relevant, reciprocal links added to a site in appropriate numbers at reasonable intervals may very well improve a site’s search engine appeal.

We’ve said it and said it and said it.  We’ve backed this assertion with logic and examples and quotes from various search-engine guidelines and directives.  But never has a senior manager at an industry leader like Microsoft come right out and in plain English confirmed what so many people have known — or at least suspected — for so long … link exchanging can still — right now in 2008 — “help boost rankings in search engines.”

The Dark Side

If you’ve spent any time mining the data archives in the Linking School or reading this blog, you’re probably aware that we dedicate as many words to telling you what not to do as we do to suggesting what you should do.

That’s because there are rules and, as the Microsoft “How To Get Links” page clearly says, ignoring them can cause search engines to “ban your website.”

Fortunately, LinksManager is 100% percent compliant with Microsoft, Google and all other major search-engine linking guidelines and best-practices recommendations.  The truth is that LinksManager’s patented technology makes it almost impossible for anyone to use it to spam the search engines even if they want to.

Such schemes as “link farming” and automatically submitting a site link to vast numbers of websites simultaneously, both of which Chilcott correctly identifies as having the potential to get a site “banished” by an engine, cannot be implemented from within LinksManager.  Neither by accident or on purpose.

Bottomline

Are we happy that Microsoft has reaffirmed that intelligent, linking-for-the-end-user exchanges are an excellent way to boost a site’s traffic and possibly improve it’s return position?

Of course, we are.  It’s always nice when a mega-rich and famous authority figure supports your position.

LinksManager’s subscribers and every other small businessperson trying to earn an honest income on the web is finally hearing the truth about linking and search engines from a truly unimpeachable source.

Microsoft has, at last, driven the ugly fear-and-falsehood balloons launched by a pack of self-serving SEO scoundrels from the cyberspace skies.

Major search engines are starting to pull their heads out of the sand and comment frankly on the hoodoo-voodoo pseudo-science known as search-engine optimization.

Webmasters can enjoy absolute confidence in the powerful, low-to-no cost branding and business-building tool that linking is, always has been and will continue to be.

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Why should I link to pages with low Google Page Rank?

Poor question. A better one is why not link to pages with low PR if they offer a relevant and easy path to your website for people who might be interested in what you have to offer.

Let’s consider both these questions by filtering them through five realities.

1. About 99 million of the internet’s approximately 110 million websites never appear high enough in Google’s returns to really matter. (”Not high enough to matter” being defined, in this case, as returning in the top ten pages.)

2. Page Rank is largely irrelevant to return position and return position is the only thing that determines if you will get any business via Google’s natural search results.

A lot of people still don’t believe this but it’s true, Google’s algorithms pay precious little attention to PR when assigning return positions.

Let’s turn that around and make it a question: True or false, Google’s algorithms pay precious little attention to PR when assigning return positions?

Dateline: Thursday, Nov. 13, 2008
Browser: Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2
Search Term: Car dealers Los Angeles
Search Engine: Google
Page Rank Reporting Agent: Google Toolbar 5 Beta
Page Ranks Of Natural Returns From Position One To Position Ten: 0,2,4,4,3,2,2,4,2,4

Alrighty, then. Let’s ask that question one more time. True or false, Google’s algorithms pay precious little attention to PR when assigning return positions?

Based on the evidence, what do you think?

3. Good, relevant links may positively affect your PR and/or return position regardless of their PR and bogus/irrelevant/automatically harvested links may negatively affect your PR regardless of their PR.

Well, yes, of course, if you have 500 organic, progressively added, properly positioned (no more than 100 per page), relevant links with a PR of eight, nine or ten it will probably — but not necessarily — make your site look more impressive to Googlebot than if you have 500 similar links with PRs of three or four. But that does not mean that all those lower PR sites can’t improve your site’s status at all.

Google, as it has said repeatedly in its official pronouncements, considers links an essential part of the web experience and uses them as a factor in its rankings. Good links are good links and can be beneficial, bad links are bad links and often are harmful. The difference between how a link to a so-called “popular” website with a high PR and a less “popular” one with a lower PR impacts a site’s ranking is usually just a matter of degree.

4. Links to quality, compatible sites with low or even no PR cannot hurt your ranking and can drive traffic and customers to your site.

There is nothing in the Google Guidelines that says they penalize sites for having good but not highly PR’d links. In fact, the guidelines clearly spell out the type of black-hat linking practices that may affect a site’s ranking adversely: link schemes designed to increase ranking or PageRank (and) links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web. The guidelines say nothing about downgrading anyone for a good link from a relatively new or otherwise under-ranked site.

Since there’s nothing there about penalizing good links to low-ranked sites, it is illogical and a bad business practice to refuse a link that would provide valuable information to your end users and/or a portal for new prospects to discover your site just because that link might not also give you a bit of SE boost.

Once again, we can explore this concept a bit by referencing Los Angeles-area car dealers in Google’s terribly useful little toolbar.

Here are ten major-brand L.A. area car dealerships and their home page Page Ranks.

Cerritos Ford: 3
Felix Chevrolet and Cadillac: 2
Honda of Hollywood: 3
Universal City Nissan: 0
Toyota of Hollywood: 3
Mercedes-Benz of Beverly Hills: 0
Bob Smith BMW: 3
Midway Ford: 3
Vista Lexus: 3
South Bay Chrysler Jeep Dodge: 2

Hhhmmm … all those bully boys who clog the SEO forums with their uninformed or deliberately biased bilge would almost certainly say you better watch out, you better not cry and, most of all, you better not link to sites with such pathetically low Page Ranks. (Sorry about the “Santa Claus is Coming To Town” bit, but it is beginning to look a lot like Christmas except at Circuit City and the other big box stores.)

Yes, that’s what most self-anointed SEO gurus would say. But what about you?

What if you owned a car insurance agency, a detail shop, a limo service, a seat cover and window-tinting service?

Would you refuse to trade a link with the Beverly Hills Mercedes dealer because Google considers a luxury car shop in one of the world’s richest communities unimportant and worthy only of a zero rating?

Are you crazy?

Would you tell Midway Ford to go to hell with their link because their PR is 3?

Are you stupid?  Midway’s one of the biggest Ford dealers in the country.

How about Universal City Nissan, which has been Hollywood’s premier vendor of that marquee since it was called Datsun? Would Google’s bestowing a zero PR on them make them an inappropriate link partner for your business?

Of course, not. Linking is all about marketing, not statistics. Car dealerships are a great place to market car insurance, auto detailing, limo services, seat covers, etc.

What we’re talking about here is what LinksManager calls “linking for end users” and what Google describes as the “basic principle (of) mak(ing) pages primarily for users, not search engines.”

Both those definitions are accurate as far they go, but they stop far short of the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Because the truth about these kind of links is that they can significantly contribute to your bottom line despite their hosts’ low PR. The truth is that these links are extremely likely to be seen and clicked by precisely the people most likely to be in the market to buy what you are selling.

The truth is that connections like this are not just links, they’re golden links.  Free links at least as good and in many cases better than the best links money can buy.

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