Do you make the most of the backlinks that point to your website? This week, we're going to pimp your links. :-)

In the news: Google introduces several new features, no-one is interested in Google Buzz, many 404 errors on your website won't hurt your Google rankings and more.

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• Facts of the week
• Search engine news and articles of the week
• Success stories
• Previous articles

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Getting links to your website is one of the most important things that you have to do if you want to get high rankings on Google and other big search engines.

Unfortunately, it is also one of the most difficult tasks. Do you make the most of your existing links? It's often much easier to improve your existing backlinks then getting new links to your website.

1. Correct links that point to your old domain names

If you changed your domain name in the past, chances are that some people still link to your old domain name.

Of course, the links to your old domain name should redirect to your new domain with a 301 redirect to make sure that the links aren't lost. Unfortunately, links through 301 redirects do not pass the full link power to your website.

For that reason, contact the webmasters who link to your old domain name and ask them to link to your new domain. This will increase the effect of the links on your website rankings.

2. Correct links to broken pages on your website

Check your website statistics and redirect all links that go to a non-existing (404) page on your website to an existing page on your site so that the visitors aren't lost.

As above, it's even better to contact the webmasters who links to the non-existing pages and ask them to change the links.

3. Try to improve the link texts

When you're contacting other webmasters to tell them that they link to your old domain name or to a broken link on your website, you can also suggest new link texts for your links.

If the links to your website include the words for which you want to get high rankings in the link text, your chances of getting ranked for these keywords increase.

4. Suggest other relevant websites

This might sound like a strange advice but it can help your rankings: when you contact a webmaster and ask for a link, you might also suggest other websites that are related to yours.

If the website that links to your website links to other websites that are related to your website topic, it's more likely that search engines will find your website relevant to that topic. Details about this co-citation effect can be found here.

5. Check the links on your own website

If you want to see certain pages of your website in Google's search results, these pages should also be linked from your own website pages. If a web page is hidden in the navigation of your website then it's less likely that this page will get a good position in Google's results.

Your website should have a clear and logical navigation that emphasizes the pages that you want to see in Google's search results.

High rankings on Google are the result of good inbound links and optimized web page content. Our popular website promotion tool IBP helps you to get both.

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