Link Building: Is There Such A Thing As A Weak Link?

I followed a forum thread recently that involved two web site owners talking about link building and the lack of quality link building opportunities. One comment caught my attention – the writer claimed they could only get weak links. He described the weak link as one that had a low PR and only delivered a couple of visitors each day. Is there such a thing as a weak link?

We often talk about quality links. These are links from sites within the same niche that do carry a little in the way of link value (PR if you like). When it comes to SEO, that’s fair enough. But what about traffic? A good link would be one that delivered a fair amount of traffic, however, they are even harder to come by. After all, what site wants to lose their traffic to another site? Is a weak link therefore the opposite – little traffic and little PR value?

You can take the opposite point of view and consider link value by weight of numbers. Fifty low ranking sites that each deliver two or three visitors each day has to outweigh two or three well ranked sites that each deliver 20 visitors. You are looking at 60 visitors compared to 100-150 visitors. Of course, numbers don’t tell the whole story.

Depending on how you look at them, weak links do exist. For SEO purposes, any link that offers no real value is a weak link – but it is still a link. If you are looking for traffic that converts then any link that sends traffic that bounces quickly and has low conversion numbers is, in reality, a weak link – search traffic included.

This leads us to another question then. When it comes to link building – should you shun weak links? I think not. The world wide web has been built on weak links. Strong links are hard to come by besides which, most of the time you have no control over who links to you. Yes, weak links exist and we all have them.