I found this nice little tool in our ongoing SEO battle to claw ourselves to the heap of the british baby clothes website pile at http://www.lilengine.com/tools/backlinks-tool.php and found that one of our main competitors with a MUCH higher Google listing than us has 330 backlinks compared to our measly 17. Not so surprising as we're new in the game, but when I actually viewed the backlinks, they were almost all links to themselves! For example, let's pretend the company's name is 'Acme pet supplies'. Their back links list almost all look like this: Buy a nice bed for your dog (anchor text) Buy great dog beds at Acme Pets http://www.acmepets.com/dogbeds/selling.asp?product=RBE0710&linkpage=dogbeds.asp Basically the link is to one of their product pages on their website selling things. What I don't understand is how that's counted as a back link. Is there something in the way the link is written that's doing that? We have hundreds of products on our website and none of them are showing up as backlinks. I would be grateful if something could tell this newbie whether 1. this is legal and 2. If this is a good way to boost our Google rankings or a good way to get banned. Thanks!
It's legal, but the links are definatley not worth as much as if they came from different IPs. As far as being banned, as long as it is not excessive, it's simple navigation and would be fine.
Well most websites have a link to the homepage from every page of the site so its not illegal, its just good practice. Tell me your url and I will take a look.
Nowhere on your pages do you link back to the homepage. You link instead to http://www.cosyposy.co.uk/index.php?viewcurrency=0 You need to link to the homepage from each page. Also the filenames for your products are not very nice, use www.cosyposy.co.uk/baby-shoes.htm rather than www.cosyposy.co.uk/KNH-0033.htm