Inbound Links: your own personal web’s opinion

Internet is an immense archive which contains billions of ipertextual files which are connected by a continuous exchange of informations and links, freely available with no limitation and no geographical confinements. Pagerank™ algorithm, was announced at the dawn of third millennium with the resonant “Bring Order to the web”. It was supposed to classify on a democratic-base (which does not necessarily mean meritocracy) documents and resources on the web introducing the concept of ‘citation ranking’, assimilating each single hypertextual link to a “vote” expressed by the holder of a site for another site: the amount of connections as a meter of evaluation of a web page’s importance.
Needless to say, expectations produced by this type of model, theorically robust and formidable, have been largely unattended. Being, in his initial incarnation, a merely quantitative before qualitative parameter, the order that the algorithm would bring was soon transformed in absolute chaos.

In 2007-almost-2008, also considering the original formula has been slightly changed in time, you cannot put qualitative analysis aside link popularity. Whether you intend links as web’s opinion on you, or citation, or information’s vehicle, or source of traffic or simply as a Pagerank™ hole-in-the-wall, you should begin to understand not all “votes” are equal and -in some circumstances- they can be also harmful.

To illustrate in simple way the different impact that links can have on a website I will use the term “force”. A multidimensional strength, according to the massive structure of information that they bring, that nevertheless will be treated as bidimensional in virtue of the clear and concrete style that I want to give this article.

On Topic Force.

The principle according to which the best inbound links, good as gold for search engines’ rankings purposes, are those deriving from connected, topical, resources, is commonly accepted at this time. A concept which is simple and intuitive. Yet, the scene of professional search engine optimization (or presumed one) is full of Pagerank™-addicted webmasters that think placing, often paying, their own link in every angle of the web represent link building’s state of the art. Quantity before quality, founded on the wrong presupposition that a link is always a link, therefore it’s always useful.

I have divided the concept of thematic strength of a link in four segments :

1. Overall: it is the principal or dominant theme of the site, inferable from the title tag of the principal page, from the contents, inbound and outbound links;
2. Title Tag: it is the title of the web page that contains the hypertextual link;
3. Page text: the textual contents of the linking document;
4. Anchor (text): the term (or, in case of image, the alt attribute), on which the connection is applied.

As it can be seen above, in the optimal situation (greatest boost as possible) the link is “loaded” by all thematic strength elements.

note: in the graph the segments have peer dimensions. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the four forces have same impact. Simply the weight search engines give an element rather than another varies with relative frequency; currently it seems that great importance is given to the text of the web page. Once was the anchor text (see Googlebombing).

Authority and authoritativeness Force.

Every search engine developer’s forbidden dream is to offer a list of authoritative and remarkable documents to its consumers each time they input a query. This goal is particularly clear in advanced engines like Google, that reward sites which are considered authoritative resources with good positionings and great weight to outbound links.

What does Google consider an authoritative site? Skipping any speculation on Trustrank et similia, a resource is judged ‘good’ according to the following parameters:

• Age of the domain;
• stability of the topic in time;
• quality of the inbound links.

At the beginning of its existence, a domain (or a site, if you prefer) is placed in a kind of limbo. An intermediary point between the full authoritativeness and the total garbage. The contents’ quality (or the cleverness of its Seo) will attract quotations, citations from remarkable and authoritative sites, getting the site further from the red zone (insubstantiality and spam) and establishing it in the green zone (importance and authoritativeness).

This is a link-building strategy issue many webmasters often underestimate in the conviction that links can be never harmful. I have personally assisted to the ban of a site whose link popularity was entirely founded on comment spamming and fake-blogs created and abandoned ten minutes later . It is a datum of fact: too many bad links can harm, more than you imagine, the search engine’s idea about a website and, in the most serious cases, can cause removal from the index. Call it ban, call it de-indexing, call it sandbox, whatever: too many useless links and you can tell your google ranking carieer bye bye.

However, image above worths more than a thousand words.

Pagerank™ force.

The last type of strength that I will take in examination is the famous Pagerank™. Maltreated by refined and malicious seos, low-profile webmasters’ delight (the terrific green bar that is shortened and it is lengthened looks like a big beautiful phallic symbol), commodity for the busybodies of the web. It is one of the two hundreds parameters that influence document ranking. Certainly not the most important, surely the most fascinating.

Aquiring an high Pagerank™ value (aka the URL of your web document receives many links in entrance) is important because the quantity of resources Google will reserve you depends on it: more frequent passages of the spiders, indexing of an higher number of pages, great weight on the outbound that you will put.

Building the priceless link, the ideal inbound, once “topic” and “the authoritativeness” of its origin are verified, it will be useful to speculate on the amount of Pagerank™ passed toward the target page. This value will essentially depend on:

• Real PR of the URL (PR shown by the Toolbar is not);
• Quantity of links (either internal or external) on the page: less is better;
• Webmaster’s attitude on selling links: that could cause a reset of the value passed through external links (like a default nofollow applied to links)

Links are a weapon search engine optimization cannot do without. But unlike once, working on the quality of your own popularity has the highest priority at this time: the ancient and ambiguous term link popularity is replaced by now by the more consistent web’s opinion. Do not let search engines have an ugly opinion of your website.

Bookmark and Share this article