Is Link Building Being Ignored?

Examining the sites linking to my own site (read this post for details) I’ve come across a possible pattern. A first, you would think it not to be true. Until you think about it.

I've noticed that almost without fail, all of my own sites listed as linking back to my own site have a PR2 or better and the link does not include target=”_blank”.

There was an exception. There's a PR4 travel site that is shown as linking to my web design site – but it does use target=”_blank”. Thought I’d broken the pattern, until I realised that hardly any pages on the travel site were listed – in fact only the links pages. When I looked carefully at the links pages there is a second link to my web design site, without target=”_blank”.

So from first impressions, it's highly possible that target=”_blank” stops a link from being listed in Google. I wouldn't go as far as saying it stops Google following the link, only it’s not shown as a backlink.

I've still got loads of non-listed sites to check, but I’ll explain why I think Google might ignore links with target=”_blank” tomorrow. And this is bad news for most link building – nearly every link swap in history must use this piece of code!