What is the use of putting in links in a website?

geek84

Goods Morning folks

I have seen numerous business & self employed websites which has links to other websites for more or further information on the subject under discussion. What is the point of that?

Aren't they just advertising the other website for free or is their anything to be gained from putting the link to it?

Thanks

Laz123

The more links a company has on their site means it increases the potential hits for the search engines so their site rises on the list of searches.

macman

And links are often placed on a reciprocal basis.

kwikbreaks

Some could paid for. Some could contain referral data and earn fees from sales genertated by them. Very often some will be "reciprocal links" - the other site will include a link back to the first.

Due to mass abuse of reciprocal links in the past I think google put less emphasis on the value of such links these days and even a negative value on links from "link farms" - sites which comprise only links and probably adverts.

geek84

Thanks for your replies.

esuhl

More info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamdexing#Link_spam

droopsnoot

Laz123 wrote: »

The more links a company has on their site means it increases the potential hits for the search engines so their site rises on the list of searches.

Surely the search engine thing is based on links to a web site, not links from it? The idea being that other people rate that web site enough to place links to it on their sites, so it must have some useful content.

forgotmyname

If you put links to my website i will pay 1p for each link if they visit more than 3 webpages.
If they buy a product on my site i will give you £1.

Good enough reason to link to my site?

As mentioned the more sites that link to my site the higher up the ratings it can get.

Laz123

droopsnoot wrote: »

Surely the search engine thing is based on links to a web site, not links from it? The idea being that other people rate that web site enough to place links to it on their sites, so it must have some useful content.

Not necessarliy. The search engine spiders look for certain criteria. For instance if you have too many repetitive tabs the spiders will ignore those sites and rank them lower. If you have links it sees that the site is popular and ranks it higher.

AshleyPomeroy

geek84 wrote: »

I have seen numerous business & self employed websites which has links to other websites for more or further information on the subject under discussion. What is the point of that?

If the links pop open in a background tab they aren't so bad. It might be that they exist to give the business an air of legitimacy, by linking to a government website giving out legal advice, or an industry code of practice etc.

An alternative, equally likely explanation is that they simply aren't very smart. I remember doing a random audit of British small business websites back in the year 2000, and most of them were just perfunctory rubbish throw up for no reason other than that everybody else had a website. Not a great deal has changed in the last fourteen years. A kiss is still a kiss; a sigh is still a sigh; small business websites are still rubbish.

To be fair, perhaps they know a lot about plumbing / electrical engineering etc, but they're naive internet users. Or the website is not an important part of their business. Perhaps it was put together on the cheap by one of the businessman's friend's sons five years ago and had not been updated since.

There are any number of reasons. "Cherchez la femme", as they say in France. Generally men are driven to destruction by their own greed. Perhaps the owner of this site put in links because he was unable to control his lust for a woman; perhaps he was in debt to the mob. Perhaps, like Charles Foster Kane, the force that drove him to succeed in business also drove him to fail, because ultimately a man is defined by his limitations. God gave us eyes that can see the distant stars, and enough life to ponder our inability to reach them. Any number of reasons.

geek84

Thanks for your advice