Ever wondered what makes links good ?

4 ingredients of link quality

I must confess that the topic of link building is one of my favorites. As I was reading a lot lately, I noticed a tragic lack of written material about link quality. It is so tragic that even the salaries of “link builders” received more attention than link quality. To correct that injustice, I wrote a few words about the 4 ingredients of link quality: Traffic, Page Rank, Topical Authoritativeness, and Trust.

1.Traffic

What a new and interesting concept!
Believe it or not, links were there before Sergey and Larry met, and even before Archie. Their purpose hasn’t changed since it all started.

Links still do a pretty good job transferring visitors between html documents.

What does transferring visitors from site to site has to do with SEO?

That question, simple yet difficult, has proven to be a differentiator between people who understand internet marketing as a process and the ones who don’t.

SEO is a method of traffic acquisition, the most important one, but still just a method. The end goal of SEO is not to rank, but to acquire qualified traffic and that’s where potential traffic comes into play as a principle ingredient of link quality. It’s crucial to acquire links that have the potential of getting you quality traffic.

Don’t get me wrong, I live and breathe search, but traffic from a highly visited web site can do wonders for a business. I have seen that happen. I swear.

The other benefit of “traffic-passing” links is their value for your SEO efforts. Highly visited sites tend to be authority sites that earned trust from the search engines over the time, and because of that and the fact that they send visitors and revenue your way, you should do whatever it takes to get those kind of links.

Pagerank

Not the kind that is being represented by that little bar. I am talking about the real page rank, actual page rank or as Google’s own Matt Cutts likes to call it “our internal page rank”.

There is nothing that makes me sad more then people who chase the green line of their Google toolbar. The ever-elusive toolbar page rank is just a simplified representation of the actual page rank at best. Or as Matt said:

At some point we take our internal PageRanks, put them on a 0-10 scale, and export them so that they’re visible to Google Toolbar users.

From his words and from my experience I don’t think Google cares to much about their toolbar page rank. I also think that toolbar page rank is built to screw with you.

Why?

Because I have seen a lot of sites with a huge number of reasonable quality links that don’t have toolbar page rank higher then 3, I have seen sites with as little as 5 links of low quality with a toolbar page rank of 4.

So, use the toolbar page rank with a grain of salt the size of a massive mountain. (The size of Dinaric Alps is the most appropriate one.) Some elements of “ranking mechanisms” will always remain somewhat of a mystery.

You will never know what is the exact numerical value that represents the actual page rank. But you can still learn to estimate that value by examining the quality and the quantity of links.

Thanks to Yahoo, you can get a decent chunk of information about any site’s backlink portfolio.

Use Yahoo Site Explorer to check every back link your linking target site has.

How many links can you see?

What can you say about the top 20 percent of those backlinks?

How strong are they?

Any government links?

Any links from “edu” sites?

Don’t forget to investigate the quality of links pointing to the sites that link to your “linking target”?

Answers to these simple questions will tell you more about page/site that you want to acquire link from, more than the little green bar ever could.

 

 

 

Topical Authoritativeness (Relevance)

Page Rank algorithm made Google the best search engine around. But from it’s birth, Pagerank had a serious weakness. It is query independent.

Which means that Pagerank by itself can’t differentiate between pages that are authoritative in general and pages that are authoritative on a certain topics. Google handled the problem with grace, implementing an algorithm named Hilltop to correct their query challenged “star alghoritm”.

How much weight exactly is placed on topical authoritativeness in Google’s ranking system is not known. According to some estimates, up to 40 % of your page’s “ranking potential” depends on it’s “topical scores” or “local scores”.

That is why it’s important to get links from topical authorities. Ideally, you should go after links with high topical authoritativeness and high page rank.

How search engines measure topical relevance?

First, they use the page title and then body text with an emphasis on what’s in the headings.

That means that the page is topically related to your site (or a specific page) if it has semantically related keywords in the titles and the body text.

Trust

All search engines love trusted sites, Google especially.
The reason is rather simple. So called trusted sites often produced or backed by government and educational institutions offer a high degree of certainty that their content will be of expert quality, objective and informational, which will only add to the user experience of searchers.

Google cares very much about user experience, so much that they will reword sites that have links from that kind of sites with higher SERP positions. Getting links from those sites is not easy and it is an art of it’s own.

Related posts:

1. Do you feel that the widespread and blanket use of nofollow tags is devaluing Google’s search algorithms? Examples such as Wikipedia, where ALL external links are nofollow. Does Wikipedia mean nothing to Google’s algorithms? Do Google take into account quality factors from nofollowed links when the links come from the well established authority websites, such as Wikipedia?
2. As Google’s algorithms evolve, is it better to have exceptional links and mediocre content, or exceptional content and mediocre links? By links I mean inbound link quality/quantity. Can you sites with awesome content outrank mediocre/established sites?
3. If a page is disallowed in the robots.txt, will a link to this page transfer/leak link juice?
4. I keep a “blogroll” page with link to all my friends’ blogs on my blog. Will that affect my blog’s reputation in Google? Recently my friend lost a PR5 to 0 for such a page.