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facethemusic
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Posted: Thu Mar 10, 2005 7:31 am
Post subject: Link Importance Inquiry
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I've learned here that the algorithms if the major search engines like Google and Yahoo place a lot of weight on "quality" links to the site and the text used in the link itself...
If I understand this correctly, can anyone give me any more insight as to how this works.
May I assume by quality links, links by websites with higher traffic are considered higher-quality?
And does page placement or other specific factors play a role? Can a link be on ANY page of a popular website and still carry equal weight of it was located on the home page of the same site?
Any insight would be great,
Thanks,
ftm |
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Charlie
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Posted: Thu Mar 10, 2005 2:42 pm
Post subject: Re: Link Importance Inquiry
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You're right to assume that the anchor text used for a link is important. Make sure people are saying your page is about what it really is about.
Make sure you have appropriate page title and headline at the very least.
| facethemusic wrote: | | May I assume by quality links, links by websites with higher traffic are considered higher-quality? |
Traffic doesn't matter, but make sure the site ranks well in Google (say) for appropriate terms. This means it isn't being frowned upon.
Look for sites on topics related to yours and try and get links from pages that have high PageRank and don't link to many other pages. Aim for a straight text link (without redirection, to simplify things) and check that "nofollow" isn't being used.
| Quote: | | Can a link be on ANY page of a popular website and still carry equal weight of it was located on the home page of the same site? |
No, just as down on the farm, some pages are more equal than others...
A link from a high-PR page with few links to other pages will be worth more. That said, going for links from good sites (because you offer something worth linking to) is a good longterm approach.
Don't get hung up on Google PR. It seems to be important, but how important is hard to know. Too many variables.
Hope this helps,
Charlie.
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facethemusic
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Posted: Thu Mar 10, 2005 5:24 pm
Post subject: Re: Link Importance Inquiry
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Thanks for the reply Charlie.
| Charlie wrote: | | Look for sites on topics related to yours and try and get links from pages that have high PageRank and don't link to many other pages. |
So a site that has a very high page rank for a keyword I'm targeting but that links to many other related sites may not be as valuable as I think?
| Quote: | | Aim for a straight text link (without redirection, to simplify things) and check that "nofollow" isn't being used. |
I'm sorry, can you better explain this part?
Thanks again,
ftm |
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robertb
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Posted: Thu Mar 10, 2005 8:30 pm
Post subject: Re: Link Importance Inquiry
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| facethemusic wrote: |
| Quote: | | Aim for a straight text link (without redirection, to simplify things) and check that "nofollow" isn't being used. |
I'm sorry, can you better explain this part?
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Basically just get a link without an image, only words.
And make sure that the link that they put up isn't something like "http://www.theirsite.com/links.cgi?linkout=yoursite.com"
"http://www.theirsite.com/links.cgi?ID=485"
but rather just
"http://www.yoursite.com"
Generally, those two examples that aren't a "pure" link, they are using some type of redirect script, and Google may not see that they are linking to you, so that link would be virtually worthless.
Also, in your page headers I believe, where you can tell the search engine spiders whether or not to index your page, you can tell the spiders whether or not to follow the links on that page. If they are telling the spiders to not follow the links, then once again you won't get credit for that link.
[I've put quotes around the example links to unhyperlink them. Admin.]
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facethemusic
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Posted: Thu Mar 10, 2005 8:55 pm
Post subject: Re: Link Importance Inquiry
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| robertb wrote: | | Generally, those two examples that aren't a "pure" link, they are using some type of redirect script, and Google may not see that they are linking to you, so that link would be virtually worthless. |
Ah ha, the things you learn by asking stupid questions... thanks! I didn't know that.
Why do site's do that? What value is it to them by coding their links this way?
| Quote: | | Also, in your page headers I believe, where you can tell the search engine spiders whether or not to index your page, you can tell the spiders whether or not to follow the links on that page. If they are telling the spiders to not follow the links, then once again you won't get credit for that link. |
Again, more stuff I didn't know. Why would someone not want their pages, or links, indexed by Google?
Fascinating stuff,
ftm |
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Charlie
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Posted: Fri Mar 11, 2005 2:26 pm
Post subject: Re: Link Importance Inquiry
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| facethemusic wrote: | | Why do site's do that? What value is it to them by coding their links this way? |
People often like to use redirects for one of two reasons...
Firstly, to track clickthrooughs, but also in case the destination link changes...
In this case, there's only one redirect to change, rather than multiple occurrences of the link.
For a discussion of the pros and cons of different redirect methods, you could try a search (it's been discussed before).
Hope this helps,
Charlie.
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facethemusic
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Posted: Fri Mar 11, 2005 4:25 pm
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It does, thanks.
ftm |
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robertb
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Posted: Fri Mar 11, 2005 8:08 pm
Post subject: Re: Link Importance Inquiry
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| facethemusic wrote: |
Why do site's do that? What value is it to them by coding their links this way? |
There is another unscrupulous reason for doing this. I hope you're able to understand my example.
For simplicities sake, say a page of a site has 10 links, 9 of them being links to other pages on the same site, and the other single being to your site.
Well the PageRank of that page is generally passed equally to all of those links, or one-tenth is passed to each page. Well, if that webmaster wants to "hide" the link out to your site, it's really only like there is 9 links out of that page. Then all of the pagerank is retained with the same site, they don't "leak" any to other sites.
This generally accompanies a link exchange where you link to them and they link to you. So basically they get all of the benefit as a new link into their site and they don't send you a thing.
While this isn't too common, it is something to keep in mind.
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facethemusic
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Posted: Fri Mar 11, 2005 8:50 pm
Post subject: Re: Link Importance Inquiry
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| robertb wrote: | | Well the PageRank of that page is generally passed equally to all of those links, or one-tenth is passed to each page. Well, if that webmaster wants to "hide" the link out to your site, it's really only like there is 9 links out of that page. Then all of the pagerank is retained with the same site, they don't "leak" any to other sites. |
Wait, I don't think I'm understanding this right. Does this mean that you can link to pages on your own site and have it positively affect your own page rank?
Wouldn't that lead to all kinds of cheating in terms of trying to gain page rank position?
I have a very popular home page, but I don't rank on certain industry keywords very well (I chose the name of the site in 1997 when I didn't know what SEO or Google was).
Are you suggesting if I was unsrupulous (for example), I could post links at the bottom of my own pages and creating a big circle jerk (pardon the expression) inflating my page rank?
ftm? |
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AllanGardyne
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Posted: Sat Mar 12, 2005 3:11 am
Post subject: Re: Link Importance Inquiry
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| facethemusic wrote: | | Does this mean that you can link to pages on your own site and have it positively affect your own page rank? |
Yes.
| Quote: | | Wouldn't that lead to all kinds of cheating in terms of trying to gain page rank position? |
That's one way of looking at it. However, it's perfectly natural to have more links throughout your site to the pages which you think are more important. On a very large site, it's impossible to link to every page of your site, so you HAVE to make choices.
The pages you choose to link more to can be your main page, important sections, powerful selling pages, or pages on which appear AdSense ads that pay well. It's your choice.
PageRank is distributed evenly throughout some sites, where every page links to every other page. On most sites, PageRank distribution is uneven.
Google has a simple explanation of PageRank here:
http://www.google.com/technology/index.html
Here are four good articles on PageRank:
http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html
http://www.supportforums.org/PageRank.pdf
http://pr.efactory.de/
http://www-db.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
Forum discussions on PageRank:
http://forums.seochat.com/archive/f-47
[Edited to correct typos.]
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Last edited by AllanGardyne on Sat Mar 12, 2005 8:36 am; edited 1 time in total |
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robertb
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Posted: Sat Mar 12, 2005 5:53 am
Post subject: Re: Link Importance Inquiry
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| facethemusic wrote: |
Are you suggesting if I was unsrupulous (for example), I could post links at the bottom of my own pages and creating a big circle jerk (pardon the expression) inflating my page rank?
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I prefer to look at it as PR distribution; you do this if you have a navigation menu, or any links across pages of a site, it's perfectly natural.
You can't inflate the PR. If you look into how PR is determined and passed on, the equations include a "dampening" factor of at least 15%. So at MOST, you could only pass on 85% of the PR from one page to another.
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facethemusic
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Posted: Sun Mar 13, 2005 9:44 pm
Post subject: Re: Link Importance Inquiry
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| robertb wrote: | | You can't inflate the PR. If you look into how PR is determined and passed on, the equations include a "dampening" factor of at least 15%. So at MOST, you could only pass on 85% of the PR from one page to another. |
But say I have a pretty popular home page, but want to make it even more popular.
What if I placed text links using the keyword I want to improve my rank on as the text anchor to the same page (a link loop of sorts) in dead spots on the page (say a bunch of them at the bottom of the page for example), and made them the smallest font I could and made text the color of the background (for example), so to the naked eye, casual browsers will rarely if ever notice the multiple link loops. Assuming they didn't pass their cursors over the spots and notice the links, they'd have to view the source code to even know they were there.
So if I added say twenty of these to the bottom of the page (or however many it took), would the spiders read the links and count them towards the pagerank of that page?
For example, say I have a Star Trek newssite site called "NewsTrek.com". It's a VERY popular site and has become a brand name with lots of links, so search on "Star Trek News" on Google and it's ranked #1 or 2.
But since few people write anything more than "NewsTrek" in their links (again, it's now a well-known brand name), the site actually ranks on page 10 or so when searching for just "Star Trek" (which is searched on MUCH more often than "Star Trek news").
So again, could I place "hidden" (making them small and the same color as the background) on the bottom of "www.NewsTrek.com" that linked back to the same page ("newstrek.com"), but using just the anchor text "Star Trek"?
This would be ten, 20, 30 (whatever) new links FROM a site with a page rank of ten, TO a site with a page rank of ten. Mathematically, this should eventually start moving me up the list.
From what I'm gathering, the search bots are going to read those links, count them towards my page rank on "Star Trek" and move me up the rankings.
Is this correct?
Again, in theory this sounds like I can simply add enough links to my own page to move me up the rankings, and then begin removing them slowly as I move up the rankings, as every time the spiders crawl my site the value of those links will increase because the pagerank of the source of the links (my site) has increased.
If so, again, sounds like a recipe for abuse...
I assume I'm misunderstanding the equation somehow...
ftm |
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robertb
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Posted: Sun Mar 13, 2005 10:19 pm
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Doing that is the easiest way to get penalized by Google. Blending links along with stuffing keywords with the same font color as the background color will be picked up as SPAM and do more harm than good.
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AllanGardyne
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Posted: Sun Mar 13, 2005 10:50 pm
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Google tells us some of the things it does and lets us guess or try to figure out the rest. I think it's very useful to try to think like a search engine engineer.
If someone placed 10 identical links on one page to another page, would you direct 10 times the PageRank to that page? I doubt it. I'm guessing 1 link, 10 links, 20 identical links would all pass on the same amount of PageRank.
Also, I strongly recommend that you avoid thinking about ways to trick Google. That's the path to disaster.
Google publicly warns us:
"...setting up pages/links with the sole
purpose of fooling search engines may
result in permanent removal from our
index."
Source: http://www.google.com/webmasters/2.html
Your site may not actually be permanenbtly removed, but it may plummet to the bottom of the rankings, which, in effect, is just as bad.
Also, if you do tricky things, it's quite possible that one of your competitiros will spot what you're doing and report your site to Google. Some people are very keen on doing that to competitors.
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facethemusic
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Posted: Sun Mar 13, 2005 11:47 pm
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Allan (and Robert),
FTR, I'm not planning on nor was I considering doing this, I'm simply curious about the mechanics of page rank.
I'm glad thy have safeguards against such manipulation, as I take pride in the premium quality of my content and the legitimate pagerank we achieve. I am sorry the site and its format was created before I knew anything about SEO, but I'm here to learn about the legimate means to improve in that area, not shortcuts.
It just struck me as a potential loophole and I wanted to be sure I understood the things being discussed in this threat correctly.
Appreciate the warnings either way though,
ftm |
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