The importance of links to your site
(a message from Jim Fish, )
As you are no doubt aware, linking has become one of the most important factors in the algorithms that determine ranking in most search engines. One of the reasons for this is that it is very hard to fake links.
Search engines love links. Links are what enable search engines to do their business — to scour the web and index every linked page. Search engines, with some justification, figure that if a site has a number of links to it from quality sites, then the site in question must be important, and so deserves a higher ranking.
Links — the number and quality of links to your site, and to a lesser extent, the number and quality of links from your site — are extremely important in search engine positioning. For all practical purposes, Google considers a site a "quality" site if it has a page rank of 4 or higher (at least on the homepage). For this reason, doing a backwards link check for a particular site using the Google toolbar only returns those pages which link to the site with a page rank of 4 or better.
Most of the emphasis on links by most webmasters is on incoming links — links from other sites to your site. Certainly these are the more important, but Google especially, also places importance on links from your site to other high quality sites on the Internet.
This is why Gary Weeks and Company does not require a reciprocal link be placed to us for inclusion in one of our directories. And why a listing cannot be bought, or traded, just because you have placed a link to us on your site. Only the very best sites, with quality content, will be considered for inclusion in our link directories. This way, our directories are much more valuable to our visitors.
Participating in a reciprocal link exchange with Gary Weeks and Company is truly a link partnership that benefits both of our sites. If you have a site that is related to our site, has high quality content, and you are interested in linking to us, please read the material on the linking information page and send us an email with the URL of your site and a little bit about your site.