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.

Tags: links, inbound links, pagerank, link popularity, seo, ranking

Yet the advantages coming from a strategic use of outbound links, especially in search engines that give link-model a great role in their own algorithms, are really clear. A link pointing to a relevant external resource confers great authoritativeness to linking document. It doesn’t cause Pagerank loss and it doesn’t increase it (”Bouncing” Pagerank flow still has to be invented). However, proper outbound linking puts your document nearer (in web graph) to websites which are remarkable for determined contents, and this approach reflects in better rankings, especially -and above all - on Google.

Taken for granted the knowledge of certain ‘laws’ that regulate optimization for search engines (do not link spam site, don’t insert too many external/internal links on a single page etc), what is about to follow are some turn-ons (positively influence ranking) and some turn-offs (they don’t positively influence it, simple uh?) of strategic outbound linking.

Strategic Outbound Linking Turn-ons:

1. Deep Linking

Which means rather directly linking documents inside a website (not the main site url, as it often happens).
Just be sure that the main site is neither banned nor off topic. Then, look for the nearest document to yours, for thematics (complementary or similar), contents, quality of external links.

Help the engines to know and to visit quality resources; let your visitors go to documents they would never know if they only relied on search engines. Shortly, your visibility on search engines will considerably increase

2. Strictly On topic Linking

True that some links toward off topic resources are not able alone to slander a well built document. However it is also true that inserting only external links which are connected with the contents of the target page enacts the difference between an ‘average’ ranking and a ‘perfect’ ranking (comparing two documents, whose contents and inbound links equal).

Think about it, when you are tempted by gaining 5 bucks/month from Casino online links…

3. More contents, less links

Quality outbounds are not able themselves to make a remarkable, authoritative and well ranked document. If outbound links were the biggest deal of search engine optimization, serps would be overcrowded by web directories and social bookmark pages. In a congruous number, however, outbounds attest the expertise of the webmaster, they approach the page to remarkable zones of the web graph, consolidate the topic, improve positioning in search results pages.

Prepare unique contents, improve them with a correct use of headings (Hx..) and paragraphs (p) and, at the end, insert a series of deepening external links. For an average lengthed text, 5/7 outbounds are more than enough.

Strategic Outbound Linking Turn-Offs:

1. Linking Google’s serps.

Demential and useless technique which had a little effectiveness some time ago, now in disuse. Search engines send (with joy) traffic verse those websites that succeed in holding back the consumers, not toward those that (with no style) try to re-send them to the sender every 3 paragraphs.

2. Linking Wikipedia.

Seemingly an ethical vote, toward an ethical project, featuring ethical contents.

But, who links Wikipedia?

Lazy webmasters want to offer their consumers deepenings and some further references, but don’t know their market that much. Nevertheless “play-it-safe-seo” doesn’t always pay. At least, not on Google.

Selfish (and a little bit ignorant) webmasters that do not want to grant a link to an unknown guy/competitor, prefers to give it to an abstract entity as the well known collective encyclopedia.

In both cases a wasted vote, toward a site that either Google and the consumers already know and that doesn’t confer any additional value to your document.

If Wikipedia’s pages steal a place in almost any Google serp’s top ten, is also because of this bad habit.
And then, let’s forget demagogy and let’s say it once and for all: linking Wikipedia is evil!

3. Linking competitors which are better ranked on Google.

Almost useless if your goal is to undermine or to overcome them. There may be a little impact sometimes but, as nearly every kind of search engine optimization issue, this technique cannot be considered a ‘method’.
The only thing that is sure is you are advertising your competitors for free and magnifying the already-enormous Google’s algorithmic self-esteem (”Hey, they’re linking to those that I have put in top ten, so my serps are really terrific!“)

Tags: outbound links, pagerank, seo, google ranking

By the way, before publishing this article I’ve made some further observations by examinating a document with the following specs:

1. “white hat” usage of the title attribute (no keyword stuffing, no seo ’stink’);
2. the content of title attribute is unique (it doesn’t appear anywhere else in the html code);
3. the content of title attribute doesn’t even appear in linked resource contents;
4. both the linking page and target page are published on websites which are remarkable and popular, no penalization applied.

Nothing is changed at this time: title attribute’s content still seems to be ignored by Google. From a human perspective therefore, the attribute title is not considered and it doesn’t engrave on ranking neither of the linked resource, nor of the linking resource.

The 3 reasons why seo’s may want to use title attribute on links

1. the fact that Google (maybe) doesn’t index the content of the title, doesn’t necessarily mean that it doesn’t consider it. What publicly appears to be cached and available may not coincide with (or limited to) what Google weigths when scoring and ranking documents in its index.

2. When building a web page, a copywriter, or a seo-copywriter, should use all the tags and all the attributes made available by the consortium W3C. The title attribute has a precise purpose in a well compiled web page: its proper usage, is not only recommended, but morally obligatory.

3. The “value” of a link is also measured considering how many times it is followed by users. Needless to say a well compiled, marketing oriented, title appearing as a tooltip when consumers’ mouse pointer passes on the anchor text, can drastically increase the chances users click on it.
Therefore, perhaps the attribute doesn’t have direct influence but the indirect influence on ranking could be terrific (just like meta description can increase CTR).

The 3 reasons why seo’s may not want to use title attribute of links

1. An extensive usage of this attribute sensitively increases the download time of the page, because of an increase of textual informations (which the engine probably throws back and therefore they don’t directly influence the scoring of document).

2. The title attribute is a generic attribute that can be added to any tags (except title, head, html, meta, param, script, basefont). As name implies, it provides an advisory of the tag in which is set. There would not be therefore surprising if search engines retained this type of information superfluous when assigning topic and importance to a document.

3. Even algorithms which are supposed to appraise “aesthetics” (ok, I couldn’be more vulgar, but that’s the point) of links (i.e. estimating position inside the page, headings, bold, strong etc ) as for instance WLR (Weighted Links Rank) * happily bypass the title attribute.

* note: as for all the algorithms, whose papers are publicly available, it is not absolutely sure that it is implemented in Google information retrieval algos.

Tags: link title attribute, seo, onpage factors