5 Strategies to Preserve Your Web Site’s Link Equity

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Search marketers go through great pains to acquire links.  Links, in general, improve the rankings of a web site.  As a result, an entire industry has been created around them.  Much to Google’s chagrin, links are bought and sold.  Product reviews are contrived – with links embedded, of course, and links are still cleverly exchanged in moderation to the same end.  One great relevant link could spell the difference between page one and page two on a search engine results page.  That could represent millions in your bottom line.  Links therefore contain an equity in and of themselves – link equity.  However, it is important to realize that not losing a link is effectively the same as acquiring one.  In fact, old links may even be better.

So let’s explore the concept of link equity a bit.  Then we’ll go through some measures you can take to preserve this equity when making changes to your web site.  Such measures do not cost any money (except for a small amount of labor), do not break any search engine’s terms of service, and they certainly don’t require any time-consuming email solicitations.  Preserving link equity, in fact, is much more fun and less stressful than all of this.