The Benefits of Friendship Links and How to Establish Good Ones on Your Website

The Benefits of Friendship Links and How to Establish Good Ones on Your Website

I. The Functions of Friendship Links

1. Improving PR (PageRank)
   There are numerous websites in the world. How can you determine the level of your own website? When cooperating with other websites, how can you quickly judge whether the other party's website is of high quality? Is there a quantifiable evaluation indicator? The answer is yes, and this indicator is called the PR value.
   The PR value is one of the most common marketing terms. Its full name is PageRank, a web - rating technology invented by Google to evaluate the importance of a web page. The level ranges from 1 - 10, with 10 being the highest. The higher the PR value, the more popular the web page is and the easier it is to achieve a better ranking in search engines. Generally, a website with a PR value of 4 is considered a good one.
   One of the most effective ways to improve your own PR value is to exchange friendship links with high - PR and high - quality websites.
2. Enhancing Keyword Rankings
   With the popularization of search engines, search - engine promotion has become one of the most important and popular promotion methods. Its professional term is SEO (Search Engine Optimization), which aims to achieve promotion by improving the ranking of the target website in search engines, and the effect is immediate.
   The principle of keyword ranking can be simply understood as a voting principle. If a website wants to get a good ranking, it needs a lot of websites to "vote" for it. The professional term for this is an external link (also known as an off - site link), and friendship links are one of the best forms of external links.
   For example, when a new leader named Zhang San in a company wants to know who the most diligent employee is, he conducts an anonymous vote among all employees. As a result, Li Si gets the most votes, so Zhang San promotes Li Si to be his assistant.
   In this process, Zhang San is equivalent to sending a search query to the search engine with the keyword "who is the most diligent person." Each employee in the company is equivalent to an independent website. Since a large number of websites (i.e., employees) link (vote) to the website of Li Si, Li Si ranks first in the search results for this keyword (i.e., the voting result).
   Therefore, if we want to get a better keyword ranking in search engines, finding high - quality friendship links is an essential step.
3. Increasing Website Weight
   Website weight is also a common marketing term, especially in the field of SEO. What is website weight? Website weight mainly refers to the degree of attention that search engines pay to a website, which can be simply understood as how much search engines like the website. The more search engines like a website, the more traffic the website can get from search engines.
   How can we make search engines like our website? It mainly involves two aspects: internally, the website structure should be reasonable, the pages should be beautiful and in line with users' usage habits, and high - quality content should be updated daily; externally, a large number of high - quality external links need to be obtained. When we exchange links with a large number of high - quality websites, search engines will increase our website weight. It's like in school: if a child always plays with well - behaved and academically excellent children, parents and elders will be very happy and think that the child is promising and a good child. On the contrary, if the child always plays with poorly - performing and disobedient children, parents and elders will think that the child is not making progress and is going bad.
4. Enhancing Popularity
   In specific situations, friendship links can also increase the popularity of a website. For example, if a newly - launched website can get a friendship link on the homepage of well - known large websites such as Tencent, Sina, and Netease, its popularity will definitely increase significantly in the short term. Or, if an industry website can get links from all well - known websites and famous blogs in the industry, it can also achieve the effect of enhancing popularity.
5. Regarding Traffic Improvement
   Many newcomers in the industry think that friendship links can significantly increase traffic. This is incorrect. The main functions of friendship links are mainly reflected in the above four points.

II. What Are High - Quality Links?

1. Alexa Ranking
   Alexa is a website that specializes in publishing global website rankings. This company monitors and analyzes the traffic data of various websites on the Internet every day and then ranks all websites in the world according to this data. Currently, it is recognized as the most authoritative website ranking system.
   According to Alexa's principle, the higher the ranking of a website, the higher its traffic. And high website traffic means that users like the website, and search engines also like websites that users like. Such websites are often high - quality websites.
   So, when exchanging friendship links, the first reference indicator is the Alexa ranking. Theoretically, the higher the Alexa ranking of the other party's website, the better. At least, it should not be much lower than ours.
2. PR Value
   We have already explained the concept of the PR value before. The higher the PR value, the more popular the web page is. Moreover, the judgment method of the PR value is simple and the standard is clear. Therefore, using the PR value to judge the quality of a website is one of the fastest methods. Usually, don't exchange links with websites with a lower PR value than yours, and at least make it equal to your PR value.
3. Popularity
   If the other party's website has a certain degree of popularity or influence in the industry, a slightly lower PR value can also be acceptable for an exchange.
4. Relevance
   Try to exchange links with sites that have a strong theme and content relevance to yours. The higher the relevance, the more search engines will value it. It's like holding an electrical skills competition but inviting a group of people from other professions to be judges. The final result will definitely not be professional. Similarly, if you exchange links with a large number of websites with poor relevance, search engines will also think that the link results are unprofessional and untrue.
5. Number of Search Engine Inclusions
   When building a website, everyone hopes that the search engine will include a large amount of its content. The more content is included, the more the search engine likes the website because only content that the search engine thinks is good will be included.
   At the same time, the more content is included, the more display opportunities it will have in the search engine, and the more display opportunities there are, the more traffic it will bring.
   Websites that are liked by search engines and can be frequently displayed in search engines are often high - quality. So, the fifth factor to consider when exchanging friendship links is the number of search engine inclusions.
   To query the specific number of inclusions, you can use the "SITE" query command. The format is "SITE: + colon + domain name." For example, if you want to query the number of inclusions of Bodaxing Network Technology on the search engine, you just need to enter "site:www..com" in the search box.
6. Web Page Snapshot Date
   In addition to the number of inclusions, you should also pay attention to the web page snapshot date. If the snapshot date is very new, it proves that the search engine pays attention to this website every day. For non - high - quality websites, the search engine will not pay such close attention. The position of the web page snapshot date is on the right side of the URL on the search engine results page.
7. Website Content Update Speed
   Websites that are not updated for a long time will not be recognized by users and search engines. Only those sites that update high - quality content every day will be favored. Therefore, during the process of looking for friendship links, the amount of content updated by the other party's website every day should also be used as an evaluation criterion.

III. Links That Should Never Be Exchanged

1. Fake PR Pages
   We have repeatedly mentioned the importance of the PR value. But it's not easy to get a high PR value. It requires efforts to get rewards. However, some people use some technical means to obtain false PR values in order to get something for nothing. Such links are to be avoided, whether from the perspective of effectiveness or morality.
   It's easy to identify the authenticity of the PR value. There are many identification tools on the Internet. For example, you can go to this address: http://pr.linkhelper.cn/. Enter the URL you want to query in the input box on its web page, and it will directly tell you whether the PR value is real.
2. Too Many Outbound Links
   Outbound links refer to the links on a website that point to other websites. As mentioned before when explaining the functions of friendship links, two of the functions are to improve the PR value and the website weight. During the process of exchanging friendship links, if the other party's site has too many outbound links, the PR value and weight allocated to us will be reduced.
   For example, if the other party's PR value is 10. From the perspective of the PR value, it is a very high - quality friendship link. But if the other party has 200 outbound links, the PR value allocated to us on average is only 0.05. (The specific calculation formula is relatively complex, so for the convenience of writing, we use the simplest division as an example). Generally speaking, if the other party's number of outbound links is higher than 40, it is not considered.
3. Dedicated Friendship Link Pages
   Some websites will create a dedicated friendship link page, which has nothing but links. If the other party asks to exchange links with such a friendship link page, firmly refuse. Because no one likes a page with no substantial content, users won't pay attention to it, and neither will search engines.
4. Invalid Links
   Just mentioned in point 2, don't exchange links with sites that have too many outbound links. But some sites, in order to increase the number of friendship links while reducing the number of outbound links, resort to some tricks (such as JS links, Ifram, framework links, etc.) to make the links visible on the front - page but not found in the page source code (search engines can only recognize the content in the page source code). Such friendship links are ineffective after the exchange. Because for search engines, they are invalid.
5. Pages without PR Values
   Many newcomers in the industry have a misunderstanding that the PR value represents the whole site. In fact, it's not the case. The PR value is for a specific page. For example, the PR value of the homepage of a website is 5, but it doesn't mean that the PR values of all pages on the site are 5. The PR values of other pages on the site may be 4, 3, or even 0. So, when exchanging friendship links, remember to exchange links with pages that have PR values.

IV. Cross - Links