Is it in anyway harmful to me to link to someone with a considerably lower alexa ranking? TIA.
One way search engines decide what your site is about is to look at who you link to.
You want to ensure that your outbound links are pointed at high quality sites. You absolutely don't want to give editorial links to poor quality/spam sites.
So how can you reliably tell good quality from spam?
You could take some phrases and titles from the sites you're interested in linking to and see if they rank reasonably well in Google for these phrases. If they do, it's likely that Google won't have a problem with you linking to them. Using this metric is a bit rough on new sites which aren't yet ranking well; I'm personally happy to give links to new sites, provided I manually assess them as high quality. If you want to be sure about only giving links to good sites though, then this is one way to do it. It's totally not a spam site, just a site by a guy who could care less about SEO - and doesn't have a lot of articles - so the ranking is pretty low.
We have common interests, and though I usually don't do link exchanges I actually thought I might help us both out a bit by doing it - I may get a bit more traffic, Google might like his site a little better. I would link.......there is so much work that can be done for good SEO....spending too much time researching the value of a link is not worth the balance of effort...
Of course...avoiding the obvious bad sites is important...ie///porn, pills, etc....
IMO... 2 possible intentions to engage in Link building:
1. You wish to build link reputation (to rank high)
You do NOT need to worry about the websites that have alexa lower than yours. Each relevant linkback counts and helps you with your rankings in search engines.
2. You wish to build traffic from linkbacks
If you have limited supply of linkbaits / articles / anything that generates this linkback... then certainly you should go for the ones that have better alexa ranking. If the linkback is for
You want to ensure that your outbound links are pointed at high quality sites. You absolutely don't want to give editorial links to poor quality/spam sites.
So how can you reliably tell good quality from spam?
You could take some phrases and titles from the sites you're interested in linking to and see if they rank reasonably well in Google for these phrases. If they do, it's likely that Google won't have a problem with you linking to them. Using this metric is a bit rough on new sites which aren't yet ranking well; I'm personally happy to give links to new sites, provided I manually assess them as high quality. If you want to be sure about only giving links to good sites though, then this is one way to do it. It's totally not a spam site, just a site by a guy who could care less about SEO - and doesn't have a lot of articles - so the ranking is pretty low.
We have common interests, and though I usually don't do link exchanges I actually thought I might help us both out a bit by doing it - I may get a bit more traffic, Google might like his site a little better. I would link.......there is so much work that can be done for good SEO....spending too much time researching the value of a link is not worth the balance of effort...
Of course...avoiding the obvious bad sites is important...ie///porn, pills, etc....
IMO... 2 possible intentions to engage in Link building:
1. You wish to build link reputation (to rank high)
You do NOT need to worry about the websites that have alexa lower than yours. Each relevant linkback counts and helps you with your rankings in search engines.
2. You wish to build traffic from linkbacks
If you have limited supply of linkbaits / articles / anything that generates this linkback... then certainly you should go for the ones that have better alexa ranking. If the linkback is for