Own website backlinks?

[FreeFall]

Hello,
i have been trying to get a better pagerank with google, and backlinks are a good thing to have and can improve the page rank of my site.
I am linking with other websites to get more backlinks, however i have seen some sites who have backlinks from the same site/domain. My site currently shows 1 backlink, and i was wondering how to increase this? shouldnt other pages on my site show as backlinks as they have a link to the index page? This is what i am trying to do.
Please help :)

[ronhollin]

My site currently shows 1 backlink, and i was wondering how to increase this?
1. Trade links with other webmasters.
2. Put your link in your sig and post in forums
3. Create other websites and link them together (mini network of sites)

shouldnt other pages on my site show as backlinks as they have a link to the index page? This is what i am trying to do.
Yes

[Josh]

I also get alot of traffic from various topsites.

You also may want to submit your site to www.dmoz.org

[creative666]

Google will only show a backlink to a site if it has a PR of 4 or more, it doesn't matter to them if it is from your site or some one elses. Having said that there can be exceptions where a PR3 or lower can be shown. But you are correct, your owns sites links to the home page will show.

What do you hope to gain by having a high PR? I out rank high PR sites with my PR4/5 sites, is your industry highly competitive.

Create other websites and link them together (mini network of sites)

I would not recommend doing this. Building a mini network of sites as you call it, or link farms as the search engines call it, will be frowned upon by the search engines and can run the risk of sites getting banned or penalised. The art of building sites for the purpose of backlinks has been a shady tactic for a while now and I would keep clear of it.

Put your link in your sig and post in forums

I have to disagree with that as well. Google can detect sites with multiple links from one domain pointing to another and discount them. It may work in the short term but for a long term seo campaign it will not work.

My advice is to build highly relevant content a couple of pages a week maybe and hunt for links from sites that are of a similar content to your own. Submit to those directories as well, find the most relevant category and submit... but be ready to wait a while untill they approve it.

:)

[darksidepuffin]

Creative obviously knows his SEO....so it'd be a good idea to heed his advice.However...I have one question for our SEO guru...that is....Link Farms....this site(htmlforums.com) is part of a network(bigresources.com) which links all network sites together on every site.Does this not constitute a link farm?

[creative666]

Good point willamoose, Google has been in the game a very long time. Their advanced ranking systems and algorithms can tell a site that has been put up for the sake of linking to another site and vice versa. If a domain has multiple links to 4 sites, and those 4 sites link back to each other in the same fashion, a search engine would be able to notice this.

Using 4 sites for a link farm is a very small figure, you can stumble on ones that user several hundred to thousands of domains, I can think of a few.

[darksidepuffin]

So your saying that google could tell the difference between,for example, big resources and <insert inappropriately themed site with 8 paragraphs of hyperlinks with keyword based links which point to probably a total of 80 sites which all do the same thing over and over and over in an endless loop of contentless keyword spam> ? (reason I'm asking is,I know a decent bit about SEO....but I never worried about it enough to contemplate if the current planned setup for my soon to be launched network would consitute a link farm or not)

[leoo24]

hehe, basically if you make it a link farm google will pick up on it, if you make it a content rich set of sites linked to each other then it isn't a link farm.

[creative666]

You need to work out if its going to be a waste of time making 80 sites that could get banned with in a month, or would it be better making 80 content rich pages for your mother site and making sure that are well linked ect... or as leo said make the 80 sites into highly content rich sites that might be a lot of work though for you to under take at the moment...

[darksidepuffin]

erm...I was using the 80 site thing as an example of what I wouldn't do...ie: something that is obviously SEO spam.My current network plan will have at the moment 4 sites,all of which will have content.

[creative666]

If you have 4 sites that have unique content but all are relevant to each other and they exchange links with each other then it should not be a problem.

[FreeFall]

Thanks for all your replies, i would of replied sooner but my email notification doesnt seem to be working, i'll check that later.

I do know about some of the basic things, e.g. link to other websites, that wasnt really the main part of the question, i also have my URL in some forum signatures aswell.

Google will only show a backlink to a site if it has a PR of 4 or more,
This was more of what i was looking at. I have a PR of 4, but google does not show backlinks from my own site, such as search pages, topics etc.

Alot of traffic on the web is through search engines, and even tho i do get some i want more...
Correct me if i'm wrong but the way i understand google to be is that when you run a search it will show the results of the highest ranked pages first? obviously the keywords and content comes into play but if you have 2 sites of the same genre and run a search the highest ranked one will come up first, that is my understanding of it anyway.

I know about Dmoz, and have tried getting my site in there for a few months, but they do not seem to put it in.

My site is actually a music forum, i have spent alot of time getting that to be more "search engine friendly" so i can get better results from google.