Linking to Google

[Silentcarrot]

Hey guys,

Heard that if you link to google from your site, it improves the rankings. Yay Nay and why?

~silentcarrot~

[Randy]

That's a big oversimplification. Linking to Google, per se, isn't going to automatically improve your rankings for anything. But linking to good quality, trusted websites that are on the same theme as the keyword phrase you're trying to rank for can help you rank. For one thing, search engines look at the anchor text of your outbound links when they determine how relevant your content is for a particular phrase. Linking to Google's search results for a particular phrase MIGHT help you rank better, for example, but linking to a page on Yahoo Answers might be just as effective.

[Sebastien]

You see some of the extremely competitve websites ranking for stuff like "poker referral codes" using this strategy.

Sites like everypoker, link to the google homepage directly on the footer. I guess they earn some seo points because they are linking to a PR 10 (the anchor they use is just Google though). And some link to a google search results page using their keywords like Google.com/keyword1+ keyword2

I would think option b is better because it is on topic but if these top sites do 1) they must have a reason to.

[Randy]

Originally Posted by Sebastien

You see some of the extremely competitve websites ranking for stuff like "poker referral codes" using this strategy.

Most of the people ranking for stuff like "poker referral codes" are ranking because they're using a link-bombing strategy. They've gotten so many links pointing at their site with variations of their phrase in the anchor text that they've overpowered the algorithm. My guess (and I'm reasonably sure I'm right) is that they would rank just as well without linking to Google from their footer.

[Sebastien]

I agree Randy. I was just saying this is something I noticed. Obviously the 50 K backlinks they have weighs a lot more than that single outgoing link to the google homepage.

[kingcobra]

Well I don't think this really matters too much if at all but it's like chicken soup if you're Jewish I guess I have a custom google search box which I put not for the link but for people to use and it didn't hurt for sure and may have helped a bit and the thinking was to have some internal searches generated. Who knows if this does any good and I suspect it has very little effect.

Ken
http://kingcobrapoker.com