Dave, the sites that are linking back to me are using a graphical “badge” rather than a textual link. This is a graphics link back, which according to your Google book, doesn’t rank as highly as a text link. Yet, my audience loves these. Now what?
Glad you’re finding useful information in my Google book. You ask about something that a lot of people are surprised to hear about but is actually quite important in terms of your overall findability, so let me explain it in detail.
There are essentially two different ways that a Web page can point to another Web page, either with a text link, where one or more words are ‘clickable’ and whisk you to another site, or with a graphical element, where a picture, figure, illustration or other graphical device is ‘clickable’ and takes you to the new page.
Why is text better, though? Because when you use a graphic, you lose the powerful value of the words that people use to link to you .
Let me show you an example: If I link to my new site ConnectSafely.com as a domain name, as I just did, then if someone searches for the domain name, the destination page is considered more relevant. Not particularly useful because if they’re searching for a domain name, they probably already know my site.
If I link to the site using a keyword or key phrase that someone might search for, however, like this: wireless security ebook then I’m taking a big step towards improving my findability for that particular phrase.
If you offer a graphical link like a badge, you get the benefit of the inbound link, but even the alt text on the graphic or the graphic filename still carry less weight in the relevance algorithm than a simple text link does. Hence my preference for people linking to my site with text, not graphical, links.
There is a possible middle ground, however, where you might offer a snippet of HTML to cut and paste that includes both a graphic and a small text link below it. That’d be the best of both worlds!
Hope that helps you out!
[…] For seo which is better text links or graphical links? Answer […]
Hello, what happens if you ahve the link with nofollow but have the domain name as the text in the link.
mysite.com
will having the mysite.com as the text in the link still help a little. I say this as googlesites change all external links to have the nofollow, I just be please to know were i to have the text itself in the link as a domain name that it would still help seo a little.
cheers
k
Howard, it certainly seems to me that any link that’s not “nofollow” is a good thing from the perspective of the search engine. The issue is that there are two items of information that the spider gleans from a link: the existence of the link itself and the so-called anchor text, the words that are on the page and are being used to describe the other page.
Hypothetically, let’s say you linked to “stanford.edu” with the text “best California college”, versus the same link on another site with “overpriced, elitist college”. You can see that the search engine would get the link data for staford.edu, but it would also use the words associated and assume that they accurately describe the site. Big difference.
When you just have a graphic link, you get the link vote, but no words meaningfully associated with the link. See what I mean?
Hi.
Question re incoming links
If a strictly graphical link from say a directory links to our site but the url in the html of the has a baked in keyword eg. widgets.com would that still be highly beneficial even if the link has no text?
Thanks
I agree with the comment about adding both text and graphic links, one for SEO (anchor text) value and another for click-thru value. But remember to place your text link BEFORE your graphic link. Assuming your linking to the same page, Google only counts the first link it encounters, as far as anchor text value goes, so you’re wasting a link if you link to the graphic link first. So text link first, then graphic link.
I like the idea of a snippet to offer. You could just set it up like an HTML/CSS email design where you host the image on your server so you ust to link to the image. All they would need is the code
I don’t know if there’s a quantifiable percentile difference, especially with the ever-secretive Google, but I think that in general both types of links are going to give you “inbound link goodness” from the Google algorithm. The big difference in my eyes is that with a graphic you can’t reinforce the keywords through the inbound link “hot” text.
Dave how to determine the percentage difference between graphic link and text link? Doesn’t matter if I link to my website by graphic from another website? wount that bring me value in google? Just wonder where is possible to read about these things?
Dave I disagree with you on this one. I’ve been involved in ads and promotions for over 10 years on the Internet, and it is a well known proven fact that graphic banner ads out perform text links to an incredibible margin! The CTR is much higher on banner ads verses text links! Nothing beats banner ads for imediate referral traffic.
Now there are benefits to text links, but none of the benefits has any thing to do with CTR or imediate traffic. The benefit of text links is for SEO, off page optimization. Getting more targeted anchor Back Links, which will improve your PageRank and SERPS. But will do little to bring any imediate traffic.
Here is what I suggest to clients. USE BOTH! Use text links for SEO, and banners for advertisements. If possible, you can use both together. Have a banner ad with clickable text underneith the banner! You will see the benefit of extra traffic banner ads bring in, and also benefit from seo of text links. You should target banner ads on related web sites, avoid banner farms, your ad should appear on the first half of the page for best results, but do not be affraid to buy ad space on the bottom of the page if the price is right. When shopping for ad space for banners, the PR on the site means very little (unlike text links). For banner ads we are going after the traffic, not the PR. High PR does not always mean tons of traffic, in fact you can have a low PR and still see tons of traffic! So you want to determind how much traffic the site gets before you buy your ad space. I would ask for direct access to their stats page.
Until next time!
Bud