Setting up your links page

[J S]

When you are setting your up page where you list other websites, are there penalties if the file is called /links.htm ? Does it matter to the search engines if these files are named links?

I see on some of the higher ranked pages these are called "Poker Partners" or "Poker Sites" and not referred to as a link page.

For example, Steve Badgers site calls it 'Other Sites" and it is set up like this: http://www.playwinningpoker.com/resources/

Would it harm him if it was set up like http://www.playwinningpoker.com/links/ ?

Also, it seems best to create additional pages once you have more than 20 or so links on a certain page (and this # might be way too high). Is this accurate??

Thanks in advance

I'm slowly becoming a fan of incorporating links into my content pages, like poker-king.com does, or onlinegambling.com.

I think that the damage done by naming a page links.html, or something similar, is that Google "might" discount those links as part of being a "links page". In that case, you're not doing your link partners any favors, which will eventually be bad for you too. (Presumably you want your link partners to carry a certain amount of authority. If your linking to them doesn't lend them any authority, then they have less authority to give back to you by reciprocating.)

Some of that is going to have to do with the perceived quality of the links too. If all your links are to the top quality authority sites in a niche, and they include unique and lengthy descriptions, such a resource might outweigh any sort of negative weight naming the page "links" might have.

[ozim]

I don't think there is any penalty for calling your links page links. After all, Google has nothing against links or even link exchanges. The only think Google is trying to do is to penalize link farms, link spam and any other activity it finds unnormal. There is definitely nothing wrong with having a links page :P

Regarding the number of links I think 20 and even more is fine. If you read Google's Webmaster Guidelines you will find that you just should keep it under 100. My belief is that it doesn't hurt you if you put a lot of links on one page, but the sites you are linking to will have less of your PR passed to them.

And now something about linking for SEO purposes and PR. People usually look for high PR sites to put their links on. But they don't realize that only the mainpage has e.g. PR5, while the link.html page may have only PR1 and link2.html as little as zero! So I'm never too happy if someone says my link will be on link4 page. But PR is not that important if your link is only on one page as is the case with link pages. What is really great for you is when your link is visible at every page of a website. It gives just so much more power! Example: look at the links at the bottom of my site - www.poker24.pl - they are visible at every single page of my portal - and Google has got more than 100 pages in its index - site:www.poker24.pl. Of course it doesn't mean that such link is 100 times more powerful, but it is definitely much much more powerful.

just my 2 cents B)

[J S]

as always, thank you for these informative answers... I appreciate the sharing of knowledge.

[GregK]

name it anything but "links" or "link"

[PPP]

Google was ignoring pages called links about a year or so ago. They don't seem to obviously be doing that now, but still there is no reason to screw around with it. Name the links page anything but links. You can use an alternate real name like sites or resources or something like that, but it is the safest to call the page xyza.htm or something like that. And definitely don't call any section a "link directory" or anything like that. Also don't use any automated link tools that create pages. That junk is eaily recognized and will likely get your pages penalized or ignored.