Building Site Popularity

Search Engines Analyze The Link Structure of the Web

In our Article on Keyword Optimization we talked about how important it is to establish the relevancy of your site’s content to the search terms you seek to gain traffic for. While having relevant content is an important factor, it is typically not enough by itself to rank in a competitive field. You must also build the popularity of your relevant content by establishing a diverse pattern of inbound links to your site.

Search engines have complex algorithms that carefully examine the link structure of every page that they index. For any given page, they evaluate which pages link in to that page and which pages are linked out to. By doing this link analysis, the engines have a large hierarchical map of the internet’s link structure and will make assumptions as to how popular and trustworthy your site is. Next we will examine some ways in which the structure and source of your inbound links impacts your site’s ability to rank.

Trust – An Effort to Eliminate Web spam

In an effort to provide a more relevant and user friendly experience, search engines are on a mission to eliminate web spam. So what classifies as web spam? A whitepaper by Stanford University researchers entitled “Combating Web Spam with TrustRank” puts it this way:

Many Web spam pages are created only with the intention of misleading search engines. These pages, chiefly created for commercial reasons, use various techniques to achieve higher-than-deserved rankings on the search engines' result pages.

This same whitepaper goes on to detail a proposal for an algorithm that would semi-automate the ranking of pages based on a scale of trust level. The manual part of the proposal is the selection of a set of seed sites, some of which are believed to be extremely trustworthy and some of which are designated as spam. The theory is that for the most part, spammy sites link to other spammy sites and trusted sites link to other trusted sites. There is speculation that Google and Yahoo are both using some form of this idea in their algorithms.

Popularity and Importance

If a site has been determined by the search engine to be extremely popular or important, then links from that site will be given more weight. These links from trustworthy sites are viewed as a type of editorial vote for your site, and will help to boost its popularity in the search index. However, all links do not carry the same weight. A link from www.nytimes.com or www.whitehouse.gov will certainly carry substantially more algorithmic weight than a link from a soccer mom’s blog.

Authority and Getting Links from other Relevant Sites

SEO experts have varied definitions for what defines an “authority” site but tend to agree that links from them are valuable. Some define an authority site as one that ranks well for the targeted terms, others say it must be well known and have many quality inbound links. Many suspect that Google has incorporated into their algorithm concepts from a document titled “Hilltop: A Search Engine Based on Expert Documents”. In this document, the concept of authority is described as follows:

We believe a page is an authority on the query topic if and only if some of the best experts on the query topic point to it. Of course in practice some expert pages may be experts on a broader or related topic. If so, only a subset of the hyperlinks on the expert page may be relevant. In such cases the links being considered have to be carefully chosen to ensure that their qualifying text matches the query. By combining relevant out-links from many experts on the query topic we can find the pages that are most highly regarded by the community of pages related to the query topic. This is the basis of the high relevance that our algorithm delivers.

Based on these ideas, we can get a pretty clear picture of the types of sites that will not provide high value authority links, and we can make educated guesses as to those sites that will.

Optimizing Anchor Text

Anchor text is the visible text that is shown for an html hyperlink. For example, the html code for a sample link to our home page is:

<a href="http://seoconductor.com/">SEO campaign management</a>

The anchor text for the above link is highlighted in bold. Notice that we used the phrase “SEO campaign management” as opposed to something generic such as “Click here”. As we mentioned earlier, search engines are busy analyzing all of the links they find and they pay particular attention to the anchor text of these links. Anchor text helps the search engine to determine relevancy, and therefore should be customized whenever possible to include the keywords that are being targeted for the page. However, we will still want to have some diversity in the anchor text that points to any given page.

Getting Valued Links

We will employ many different methods as we work to acquire links for your site. Our strategy will be focused on acquiring high quality links – those that fit the profile of values we discussed earlier. The methods we choose and order of execution will be dependent on your particular industry and the needs of your site.