Why Sidebar Links Are Important

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Link popularity is the number of links you have point back to your website. While sheer numbers alone are not enough to ensure high search engine rankings, getting a lot of back links is important as part of your search engine optimization strategy. There are several ways you can get those links.

One way is to search and find high PR websites that will link to you because they love you. That’s a difficult task and can take a long time to win over those high value links. You might even have to pay for some of them (which I wouldn’t recommend). Another way is to build up your arsenal of back links by building links over and over and over again. Sidebar links in your blog can do that.

It is difficult to gauge whether repeated links in a blog do any good at Google because Google doesn’t report every link. But Yahoo! seems to report them all and I can tell you that one blog with a 1,000 blog posts and a link in its sidebar to a sister site will register as multiple repeated links to that website. Every time a page is indexed at Yahoo then you get a new inbound link. That’s why many times you’ll see your link popularity numbers for Google in the double digits and your link popularity at Yahoo 20 or 30 times that.

Just imagine the kind of link popularity you can build with five or six blogs, each focusing on a separate niche of your business and pointing back to your primary website. Google may not like blog networks, but it Yahoo doesn’t seem to mind and you can still get a lot of traction at the search engines with Yahoo. Plus, other, smaller search engines have similar policies as Yahoo when it comes to counting those back links. And all it takes is for you to get in good with one or more of those search engines (such as Ask or Dogpile) and Google will love your site too.