Question to SEO Expert: I’m wondering if i’m doing something wrong with link building. I’ve put a variety of links on my site that others can copy onto theirs.

These banner ads act as links and do work, but for some reason they don’t seem to be counted as a link to my site. [A flash page] uses one of my banners on their link page, so surely this should count as one inbound link to my site? I’ve been on www.Alexa.com to check who is linking to my site and Vale Wildlife isn’t mentioned. I don’t want to keep pushing other websites to use my banners if they are not counting as an inbound link and helping my search engine ranking. What am i doing wrong? Many thanks, Matthew

Our SEO Expert answer: Hi Matthew, there are three reasons why the link you mention is not showing in Alexa.

1. The page is not indexed in Google or Bing. If a page is not indexed, it’s not very likely to show up as a backlink. Further, I’d suggest using QBL, OpenSiteExplorer or some other backlink tool.
2. Secondly, the link is not showing up in the code, it’s a flash page.
3. Finally, Google might be able to algorithmically detect pages that are only made to boost rankings, such as link exchange pages, mentioning the word ‘link’ in the URL.

Banner ads like the page you created is not a useful method to gain rankings in search engines, it’s rather a method frown upon by search engines. You better discuss with webmasters from relevant sites if you have something in common or read some of the most common link building methods.

Further, Google want webmasters to use ‘no follow’ for banner ads. Finally, I suggest you try to find relevant and trusted links.