Maintaining a “Related Links” Page

Since you must have external links that point to your site to increase your ranking with Google, other website owners will likely ask you to reciprocate as well by asking you to put links on your site that point to their sites. For this reason, you need to create and maintain a “Related Links” page.

In general, you should only link to other sites that offer similar or complementary products and services to your own. Don’t clutter your Related Links page with links to your aunt’s personal page for example (unless your aunt is in a similar line of work!). Remember that Google is analyzing what the theme of your site is, so you need to use keywords on your Related Links page that are related to your site’s keywords. This includes using keywords in the text of links that point to other sites if possible.


You should also include some actual content on your Related Links page. Simply don’t create a long list of links with no text. deally, all outgoing links to other sites should be located on single Related Links page on your site. This is because outgoing links can “leak” some your site’s total PageRank. There are two methods that can be used to counter this effect: Make sure that each outgoing link is reciprocated with a link back to
your site, otherwise don’t add it to your main Links page.
Add a second Links page that contains only non-reciprocating links and then prevent Google from crawling (and hence calculating PR for) that page.



Tip: For every search directory and portal you submit your site to and get listed on, you should also add a link pointing to it on your Related Links page. Make sure that you point to the specific category or sub-category page that you are listed in.