LAST EDITED ON Dec-16-07 AT 08:53 AM (PST)
Here's an important concept I call "Sacrificial Links."These links:
-Dilute - You may not always want to have all links pointing to "yourself".
-Should NOT hurt you by linking to them - Sacrificial links should point to the dominate sites in your broadest niche.
These sites have so many links to them that adding a few more won't change anything.
-Gain Trust - By linking to the real powerhouse sites, you may inherit some of their trust and relevancy. If linking to bad neighborhoods is bad, then linking to good neighborhoods is probably good, and at the very least it "isn't bad".
It does make sense that pages that link to good pages should rank higher than pages that link to bad pages.
- "Clustering" - It's assumed Google uses something known as "clustering". Clustering is when text and links are grouped together.
Clustered may look like this:
Apple
Banana
Cherry
Just because these links are clustered together MAY mean then have influence/relevance with the other links in the same cluster.
Because of these, we may want to cluster our own links with high power "sacrificial" links. We may inherit some of the benefits, and many advanced SEO'ers believe that pages do inherit the good and bad from the pages they link to...And it does make sense.
Simply, sacrificial links are links to super-powerful sites that don't hurt us in any way by linking to them, and may help us in many ways.
Let's say I added a back packing article to www.Lizardz.com .Now I wanted to add a link to this article to a Squidoo lens.
In the favorite links module, I add these links:
NationalGeographic.com
Lizardz.com Backpacking in Colorado (long tail)
AnimalPlanet.com
I'm doing this to camoflage that this Squidoo lens is just linking to my own site.
I can't compete with NationalGeographic or AnimalPlanet, so giving them links won't hurt me and those links may well help, while giving some "cover" to my own link.
When you're a little guy, try putting yourself next to the big guys as much as you can, for all types of marketing including SEO.