Links and Orphans

If you regularly update your website, I’m sure you check your external links. If you don’t or if it has been some time since you updated your site, check them now!

When I recently checked my external links, I found that many of the incoming links were no longer there. There are of course many reasons why this happens. Websites that are discarded or taken over by another person or company, websites that are moved, linking-in pages that are moved or have been deleted are all common reasons.
More worrying, are the websites that break the link from their site to yours deliberately. This is more common with websites that that have a reciprocal link agreement with you through one or more of the link exchanges. The idea being that one-way links increase their popularity vote with the search engines.

However, search engines are far more sophisticated than the people who use those tactics. If you come across a website like this, remove your link and forget about it. Your blood pressure and your health are far more important.

One type of link to be aware of is the ‘orphan’ link. Basically, this is a link from an ‘orphan’ page. Since no pages are linked to the ‘orphan’ page from the originating website, the spiders will fetch the ‘orphan’ page via the link on your website. Think of it as adopting someone else’ page for indexing. If there are other websites linking to this ‘orphan’ page, it’s a shared adoption. Perhaps the search engines should remove the page from the parent website. Or, better yet, the parent.

:)

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