What Are The Best Type Of Links?

If you ran a finance website and I approached you offering you a link out of my PR4 mortgages website (no strings, just a free link) then what sort of link would you want? A couple of keywords? You site name? 'Click Here'?

Nearly everyone would go for the the first option, the rest opting instead for their site name. But is that the correct answer? If you are arranging links, then the answer should be whatever is the best type of link.

What is the best link? We only need to look at a few well known websites that have made Google Page Rank 10 or 9 and then think about their linking structure. These have got tons of links in with the anchor text 'click here'. It's sheer volume of links that Google recognises that has worked for them, not keyword stuffed links. OK, these sites now do well for 'click here', but it's not really a main keyword.

Let's look at this the other way around. If the link is using high performing keywords, is it most likely that the link is a "natural link", a result of a links swap or someone optimising their site using internal linking. On the whole, I'd say links swap, optimisation then natural links (including internal non-optimised links).

So what does a keyword stuffed link tell us. Probably that there's a good chance that link has been created to fool search engines. If Google's long term aim is to detect and ignore these SEO links, then what's it going to go? Probably, if not already, it will start to ignore popular keywords in links and gradually include more keywords in that list until it gets the right results.

So just what are the best type of links? Natural links of course - I decide to link to you because I want to. And when that happens I include in the link's anchor text something relevant to that page, not necessarily to your site.