As we’ve just discussed, many link building efforts in the SEO world are done to improve a site’s search engine rankings: Links as votes, as trust, as rank-building influencers, etc. There are, however, other reasons to build links as well
Gaining Direct Traffic:
Oddly enough, search engine spiders aren’t the only ones that see links to your site. Web users visiting sites can and (hopefully) do click on those links, generating direct traffic to you. Once again though, it’s worth your while to focus on quality links from relevant pages. How often have you actually clicked on a link you found on an extremely spammy, worthless page? If the original page is garbage, you assume anything it links to is probably garbage as well.
It should come as no shock that humans passively analyze page quality when assessing link value. After all, the search engines ultimately try to algorithmically reproduce the results a human would provide if they had the time to editorially rate every single page in existence.
As such, you will get higher volume and better quality direct traffic from pages that are not only popular and highly trafficked themselves, but relevant to your content.
Visibility, Branding & Influence:
What happens when every time someone looks around online for information about boats, tours or Seattle they see not only links to your site, but comments about you in every prominent blog on the subject? You become an authority in the field. By participating in the community around your niche and building content worthy of links and discussion within said community, you gain visibility, branding and influence.
How you want your image to manifest though is entirely up to you. This is just one more example where quantity may be easy to come by, but quality is what really counts. Do you want to have visibility as that guy who always has useful information, the one everybody should check out if they’re interested in Seattle boat tours? Or do you want to be the Weekly World News of your niche, always complaining of a Loch Ness-like monster in Puget Sound?
As people within (and even outside of) your community begin to recognize and respect your image and your brand, they will reference you and link to you as a resource. Links bring traffic, links bring search results, links bring passion…make your users passionate about your site.
Friday, February 19, 2010
Why Search Engines Measure Links
PageRank and Links as Votes:
Larry Page and Sergey Brin publicly pioneered the use of link measurement as an indicator of search relevance when they created the Google search engine. The initial idea behind their legendary PageRank system was that a link to a particular page is equivalent to a vote by the linking page for the linked-to page.
As the theory goes, by measuring not only the keyword relevance on a page, but also the number of “votes” it had, you could accurately determine which pages were considered by the web’s users to be most valuable for the given search terms. Furthermore, links from web pages with high PageRank would be more valuable (considered more authoritative and reliable) than links from low PageRank pages.
This initial model, while revolutionary, didn’t consider the quality of on-page content, trust metrics or semantic relationships and was thus extremely vulnerable to manipulation.
Improvements in Link Quality Scoring:
Over the years all of the major search engines adopted the link-based ranking model with some stylistic variation from engine to engine. The technology, quality and “intelligence” of the various search algorithms continually evolve in an effort to improve the quality of returned search results.
Anchor text is now considered when evaluating the relevance of a given link to the given keywords. If a site about Seattle Boat Tours has lots of links pointing to it with anchor text written as ‘Seattle boat tours’, those links will provide greater value to the link recipient than links with anchor text such as ‘click here’ (at least for searches on “Seattle Boat Tours”). We will discuss anchor text in greater detail in the next section.
Semantic attributes the of on-page text surrounding links is also analyzed. For instance, if a link to Seattle Boat Tours is in the middle of a page about theoretical physics as it relates to the study of Scientology, that link won’t be considered as valuable as the same link with adjacent content about Seattle, tourism, boating, etc.
Search algorithms also consider relationships between linked sites. By analyzing things like IP addresses, reciprocal links and domain registration information, the engines try to determine if the links are valuable organic links, or if they are manipulative, artificial links created solely for ranking purposes.
Links as Quality Control:
By using the methods discussed above to measure link quantity and quality, the search engines create a ranking system that is much harder to manipulate than one based solely upon on-page factors. That is not to say, however, that page structure and actual content are not evaluated. The link-based model simply places more importance on links based upon the theory that only well-designed, content-rich pages will get high-value links from reputable sources.
Trusted Domains:
Link factors such as anchor text, semantic relevance and page relationship certainly matter, but perhaps no factor matters as much as the trustworthiness of the domain providing you with your link. A single link from CNN or The New York Times is worth more “link-juice” than dozens of similar links from no-name blogs and MySpace pages.
Trusted domains have proven over time (ironically, through the acquisition of thousands of trusted links) to be worthwhile and reliable sources of quality information about their given subject matter. As such, when the search engines see that these sites link to you when discussing your area of focus, they pay attention. This tells the engines that a reliable and trusted source thinks you are an expert and you offer content that’s extremely relevant to the topic.
Think about it this way: If the Weekly World News runs the headline ‘Two-headed Dragon Boy Born in New Jersey,’ would you take it seriously? No? What if the same headline was on the cover of Time magazine? In nearly everyone’s mind, the Time link to ‘Two-headed Dragon Boy Born in New Jersey’ is far more valuable and credible than the same story from the Weekly World News.
This is why we don’t go into a state of shock when we see bizarre WWN headlines every week in the grocery checkout line: they’re simply not reliable for anything other than a laugh. In the online world, the search engines use their artificial intelligence algorithms to make similar determinations. Thus, 50 links from Moe-does-Mortgage.com is not nearly as valuable as one link from Bankrate.com or CNN’s money.com.
This is a self-perpetuating process on the web. The more trusted, valuable links your site receives, the more trusted and valuable your site (and the links you give) becomes.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin publicly pioneered the use of link measurement as an indicator of search relevance when they created the Google search engine. The initial idea behind their legendary PageRank system was that a link to a particular page is equivalent to a vote by the linking page for the linked-to page.
As the theory goes, by measuring not only the keyword relevance on a page, but also the number of “votes” it had, you could accurately determine which pages were considered by the web’s users to be most valuable for the given search terms. Furthermore, links from web pages with high PageRank would be more valuable (considered more authoritative and reliable) than links from low PageRank pages.
This initial model, while revolutionary, didn’t consider the quality of on-page content, trust metrics or semantic relationships and was thus extremely vulnerable to manipulation.
Improvements in Link Quality Scoring:
Over the years all of the major search engines adopted the link-based ranking model with some stylistic variation from engine to engine. The technology, quality and “intelligence” of the various search algorithms continually evolve in an effort to improve the quality of returned search results.
Anchor text is now considered when evaluating the relevance of a given link to the given keywords. If a site about Seattle Boat Tours has lots of links pointing to it with anchor text written as ‘Seattle boat tours’, those links will provide greater value to the link recipient than links with anchor text such as ‘click here’ (at least for searches on “Seattle Boat Tours”). We will discuss anchor text in greater detail in the next section.
Semantic attributes the of on-page text surrounding links is also analyzed. For instance, if a link to Seattle Boat Tours is in the middle of a page about theoretical physics as it relates to the study of Scientology, that link won’t be considered as valuable as the same link with adjacent content about Seattle, tourism, boating, etc.
Search algorithms also consider relationships between linked sites. By analyzing things like IP addresses, reciprocal links and domain registration information, the engines try to determine if the links are valuable organic links, or if they are manipulative, artificial links created solely for ranking purposes.
Links as Quality Control:
By using the methods discussed above to measure link quantity and quality, the search engines create a ranking system that is much harder to manipulate than one based solely upon on-page factors. That is not to say, however, that page structure and actual content are not evaluated. The link-based model simply places more importance on links based upon the theory that only well-designed, content-rich pages will get high-value links from reputable sources.
Trusted Domains:
Link factors such as anchor text, semantic relevance and page relationship certainly matter, but perhaps no factor matters as much as the trustworthiness of the domain providing you with your link. A single link from CNN or The New York Times is worth more “link-juice” than dozens of similar links from no-name blogs and MySpace pages.
Trusted domains have proven over time (ironically, through the acquisition of thousands of trusted links) to be worthwhile and reliable sources of quality information about their given subject matter. As such, when the search engines see that these sites link to you when discussing your area of focus, they pay attention. This tells the engines that a reliable and trusted source thinks you are an expert and you offer content that’s extremely relevant to the topic.
Think about it this way: If the Weekly World News runs the headline ‘Two-headed Dragon Boy Born in New Jersey,’ would you take it seriously? No? What if the same headline was on the cover of Time magazine? In nearly everyone’s mind, the Time link to ‘Two-headed Dragon Boy Born in New Jersey’ is far more valuable and credible than the same story from the Weekly World News.
This is why we don’t go into a state of shock when we see bizarre WWN headlines every week in the grocery checkout line: they’re simply not reliable for anything other than a laugh. In the online world, the search engines use their artificial intelligence algorithms to make similar determinations. Thus, 50 links from Moe-does-Mortgage.com is not nearly as valuable as one link from Bankrate.com or CNN’s money.com.
This is a self-perpetuating process on the web. The more trusted, valuable links your site receives, the more trusted and valuable your site (and the links you give) becomes.
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