Why are my inbound links and results low?

When trying to determine how many inbound links you may have to your website or just what your search results are, you may have noticed that the number always seems to be a little bit different each time. From what the experts out there seem to agree on is these numbers only represent a "sampling" of your search results.

What seems to be the consensus on this is that the search engines do not want to provide too much information that could offer insight into their algorithms or provide detailed information to their competitors. Even using their own Webmaster Tools systems yield conflicting results.

Another factor in these number discrepancies is depending on where you are in the world, the time of day you are searching and what you are searching for, different numbers can be displayed. With thousands and thousands of servers used to process the search results, each search request could yield some different information depending on the servers you are hitting.

When looking at this data, just keep this information in mind and try not to dwell on it too much otherwise your head may just explode. For more information on this phenomenon, refer to the reference articles below.

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How to Get Inbound Links

As the competition online continues to grow, more emphasis has been put on SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This emphasis on SEO has put stress on search engines to update their algorithms more frequently. With conventional algorithms however, it was never long before spammers & SEO's would find a way to abuse the algorithm. 

One way in particular has shown that accurate results can be achieved through the use of hyperlink analysis. Because there is now this emphasis on hyperlinks, we advise that you attempt to gain inbound links (links to your website) from other websites. Although if you own more than 2 websites, be careful of how you link them together as you may inadvertently create a link farm. You can read more on Link Schemes here

Achieving mass inbound links is not as difficult as one might think. In fact you may be pleasantly surprised to hear that a website with good content may over time receive thousands of voluntary inbound links from other websites. In order to gain some links fast however, you may wish to request inbound links from other website owners. The most effective method of gaining inbound links is to find websites of similar topic to yours and send an email to the webmaster of that site asking if he would be kind enough to link to you. Keep in mind that only a small percentage of people will actually take you up on the offer and link to your website. Moreover, if the site is a competitor they will almost certainly not link to your website.

One way to increase the chances of getting other website to link to you is to offer a link back to their website. This kind of link exchange is known as "reciprocal linking". In the email you will send to the webmaster of the other site, be polite and brief. Explain why you believe a reciprocal link will be of benefit to both parties.

You may wish to use the Open Directory Project to find websites in a similar category to your website. If any of these website have an email address and invite you to contact then, then use the opportunity to request an inbound link to your website.

Using the Correct Link Text

The text used in links is by far the most important part of gaining inbound links. Search engines use the "anchor text" to determine the primary keywords for a given site. The idea behind using the anchor text is that the most descriptive and relevant words are usually used in order to link to a website, so these should be more accurate than on-site keywords. If requesting a reciprocal link, always try to get the webmaster to use your target keywords in the link to your website.

A good way of getting people to link to you with pre-defined text is to create a page on your website with link examples. This way you have more control over how people link to you.