I’m making a Website and I have a simple question. If I want to add links do I need to ask permission from the owners of the websites I would be linking to? Thanks.
No.
OK, that’s what I thought. Thanks.
As a matter of courtesy, it doesn’t hurt to ask…
When I worked for a regulatory body in the UK, if people asked permission to link, we used to send them a specially designed graphic which incorporated our crest, which noone was allowed to use with out permission, so asking got them a little extra…
Grim
Yeah. Plus, sometimes, they’ll put a link back to you to be nice. If you’re trying to make your website more popular, that can really help.
Good advice. Thanks.
Additional benefits come from search engine placement. The more links to and from a site, the higher it goes. Generally. After some mysterious calculations.
The above discussion assumes that you are talking about text with an anchor tag, which is almost certainly what you are asking about:
<a href=http://anotherserver.com/anotherpage.html>your text here</a>
A practice somewhat frowned on is “hot linking.” If another site has a picture you like, HTML allows you to include the same picture on your own site by an img tag
<img src=http://anotherserver.com/somebodyelsesphoto.jpg>
This should not be done without permission, since every time your page is loaded, some of the bytes have to be sucked from the other server and count against its own data transfer limits.
Oh yeah, I know that hot linking without permission is usually frowned upon, that’s why I asked about just linking to the website.
I wouldn’t bother to ask. First of all some people get really hostile, so why bother. Second of all, no search engine penalizes for a link TO them. They may penalize for links you put on your own site.
Secondly Google and other search engines weight links which is very important to understand.
Suppose I have a page rank of 5. And I put a link to your site. You now share in some of my page rank. OK but how much? No one knows for sure.
Second you have to realize page rank is not proportional.
I’ll make up some number to illustrate. Let’s say my page rank of “5” is worth 100 points. Now a page rank of “6” may be worth 60 points. A page rank of “7” may be worth 27 points. Now a page rank of “1” may be worth 250,000 points.
You see the weighting of a page 1 rank is astronomical compared to others.
So a link FROM the New York Times to YOUR site, is worth a lot. Why? Because the NYT has a page rank of “1”
But a page rank of 2 might be only worth 5,000 points.
And Google changes this method of ranking randomly (well to you it’s random, Google has a rhyme and reason behind it)
Remember the page rank depends on the site, and the keyword. Different pages in a site also have different page ranks PLUS an overall page rank.
So you can see it’s really complex. You can check sites like Search Engine Watch (dot) Com to read more
Again, I oversimplified a bit to make for better understanding. And truthfully no one know for 100% sure how Google ranks, but places like Search Engine Watch test it out and can make excellent guesses. That is till Google tweeks it’s methods.
One other thing I’d like to mention, in order to increase your visability in search engines, always link with words
For instance DON’T say: For further info click here
Say (for example): For further information check out Straight Dope
Well, I don’t expect too many people visiting my web site because it won’t have anything to draw in a huge crowd, so I’m not too concerned about links weight. Also, I’ll probably end up with a lot of links so I might skip asking the sites about it just because I don’t want to deal with asking lots of sites for their blessing.
Oh yeah, I plan on using their names.