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 want you to reciprocate by having you place a link on your site that point to their site. For this reason, you need 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. Add a short description of the site to accompany each link.

Ideally, all outgoing links to other sites should be located on a single Related Links page on your site. This is because outgoing links can “leak” PageRank on a page that contains outgoing links. Make sure that each outgoing link is reciprocated with a link back to your site, otherwise think about it if you really need that link (as a customer service).

Caution: Google has been known to flag web pages whose titles are created by link-generation software.

Specifically, if you use the Zeus program to generate a Related Links page for your site, you should change the title of the page from the default “themeindex”. In general, such programs, while useful, need to be configured according to your specific needs and to avoid looking like a “cookie-cutter” page.