October 10, 2008 by Matt Thomas
Unsurprisingly, due to their ability to make or break a site’s ranking, there’s a lot of discussion about incoming links in our meetings with clients. People want to know what kind of links to aim for, what determines the weighting of a link, how search engines make the distinction between a good link and a bad one.
Since this is the Internet, the conversation usually becomes fairly long and complicated. There are many different factors that search engines use to evaluate the strength of a link and the amount of that strength that is passed on to the specific site page. However, we feel that there are a few key points that make a huge difference to the strength of a link.
- The first is anchor text. If you have targeted your site towards specific keywords, having those keywords appear as the link text can make a real difference
- Another thing to consider is the current page rank of the linking page. Unsurprisingly, Google gives more credence to the more highly ranked pages
- If a site has used NoFollow on your link, it’s as good as useless. It’s still indexed, by Microsoft and Yahoo anyway, but it passes absolutely no page rank
- Relevance is another thing to consider. If the page linking to you is highly relevant to your content then that link will be rated much higher than irrelevant links
- The link also needs to look natural, ie. surrounded by content that is relevant to the link. Otherwise the link won’t pass much value
- Where the link is placed also makes a difference. Near the top of a page or as part of a page’s content is best
- Something that makes Google suspicious is links that come and go often on pages. You really want permanent links
- Another thing that make Google look twice is sites linking to each other often. This all but broadcasts a quid pro quo between sites, which is frowned upon
I Hope that answers some questions. Have a good weekend!
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