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External Linking Factors Link Popularity and Link Relevance
The internet, and especially the world wide web is an infrastructure predicated upon the notion of links.
Thus it should come as no surprise that one of the strongest determinants of a page's ranking is to do with the characteristics of its inbound links (ie. links from other websites).
Make sure any inbound links come from what counts as an external site.
Search engines place a strong emphasis upon links from external sites. Perhaps this is because they consider external links to be a hard aspect to ‘fake’, when it comes to gauging website relevancy. Generally, in order for an incoming link to count as being from an external site, it should at least be from a different ‘C’-class address block*. (see Doorway, Hallway and Pointer Pages for more related info)
If you want to be more safe (an guard against any sudden changes in the SE's algorithm) you may wish to also make sure that the other site's WHOIS database information is also different (ie. different business name, contacts etc).
Warning: It's not just Link Popularity that matters
You may have received unsolicited-email promotions that claim that you can gain 1000s of links for just a hundred dollars which will rocket you to the top ranks. Apart from their rather dubious nature, there are also a number of very solid reason you should avoid such schemes - if you are interested in stable, reliable and long term benefits from your website.
(i) Search Engines are quite actively against networks of websites which conspire to all link to each other in an attempt to gain relevance. These so-called 'link-farms', 'link-clubs' or whatever the may be called have certain characteristics that can be screened for (for example the relatively limited number of links that are from outside the group). Sometimes small link-farms can go undetected, but once discovered (whether by SE algorithm or competitor-scorn), sites have been known to be penalised to the point of being banned. So be careful... joining an unscrupulous linking club may not just waste your money, but may also cause irreparable damage to your website.
(ii) Link popularity or the sheer quantity of links that point to a website are certainly not the only determinant of a site ranking. Analysis of top ranked websites across many categories consistently reveals sites that are lower ranked websites that sometimes have many, many more inbound links than more highly ranked ones.
(iii) SEs are very weary of websites that register a sudden and large jump in link popularity (for example, from no links to suddenly hundreds in a short time). They'll be certain to closely scrutinise such sites, or even automatically penalise them.
Think quality and relevance.
The search engines take into account not just the quantity of incoming links, but they assign a lot of relevance to their quality. This is judged in a couple of ways. Firstly, it is judged by the importance and relevance of actual originating site. The relevance of the originating site is generally to do with how similar the theme (read ‘keyword themes’) of a site is to the site it links to.
What counts as an important site?
There are proprietary weightings that SEs assign to websites that they list. These affect the weightings or 'ratings' of other sites the are linked to by them.
Google has what it calls 'PageRank' and Yahoo has 'Web Rank'.
It's
very important to consider the 'rating' of the site that you're
considering getting a link from. To view this ratings or weightings you'll
need to download and install the Toolbar of the respective SE. When
you visit a website, the tool bar will send a request to back to Google or
Yahoo, which will then send back its rating to be displayed on the
toolbar,
For example in the link text is in green in the HREF (hypertext reference) tag
<a
href="targetpage.htm">this is link
text</a> How about Affiliate links?
It is
possible that the SEs also try to determine what links are affiliate links
so as to not give them so much weighting.
* What's a C-class block? Lets examine an IP adresss that takes the form 255.255.255.255 or xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx. This can also be split into separate blocks as such. aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd where ddd is the host. ccc represents the ‘C’-class block. This shows that the website is seated upon a significantly different network within the Internet, so that it counts properly as an external site.
If Google, for example, thinks that the other 'external' website that links in to yours is actually part of the same network, then it may disregard or even penalise a website. This is because they may think their is some probability that you are attempting to artificially gain relavence. (see Doorway, Hallway and Pointer Pages for more related info)
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Process: Explained In-Depth Guide to SEM
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SEM Advantage (SPS Group Pty Ltd) Suite 207, 410 Elizabeth Street, Surry Hills, NSW 2010, Australia
p 61 2 9280 0010
f 61 2 9280 0081
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All content is (c) copyright 2004 SEM Advantage
No reproduction permitted without prior written consent |
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SEM Advantage (SPS Group Pty Ltd)
Suite 207, 410 Elizabeth Street, Surry Hills, NSW 2010, Australia p 61 2 9280 0010 f 61 2 9280 0081
Copyright (C) 2003 SPS Group Pty Ltd. No Reproduction permitted
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