Following my rant yesterday a number of emails have come in asking for better explanation of why links are so important and why Google et al. places so much weight on them. The explanation is in fact easy.

When Sir Tim Berners Lee designed the Internet it was meant as a method of sharing scientific documents for review and contribution. Each document was in effect a web page. The first Internet browsers then grew out of this as a means of publishing documents (known as web pages), but without the ability to contribute to this documents (see me article on What is Web 2.0 for an explanation of why). The Google algorithm amongst others is rooted in this premise of documents; when any article is published say in a scientific journal it is published for consideration by others experienced in the appropriate area. Other articles are subsequently published with references back to the original article. The more references in subsequent articles the more we consider the original article to be of importance - to be an authority on the particular subject.

Search engines apply this basic principal - the more links that a particular page has from other web pages the more important that page must be. Search engine algorithms obviously have to take into account an enormous amount of factors that we as humans either consciously or sub-consciously take in when we read an offline article and consider its’ references to other articles: is the other article relevant to the information we seek and should we read that article, being probably the most considered. Search engine algorithms therefore have to be able to consider the content of the web page that is making the link to original page and therefore give weight to the relevancy of that content and reference. This is the basis of the page rank notation.

It is no surprise that we are all trying to “beat” the search engines - achieve higher search results through creating a perception that our web pages are of more relevance than others on a particular topic - so it is also no surprise that the search engine algorithms are having to continually develop at such a fast pace to keep up with the ongoing manipulation battle. Take for example the process of reciprocal links - if links are the most important in a web pages ranking, then I will swap you a link from my page for one from yours. Not what Google had in mind- solution, deprecate reciprocal links. How about I buy a link then? Again not the idea - links are supposed to be based on your content quality - solution, Google now has the ability to report sites that are buying links in the webmaster toolbox.

There are some clear rules on how to get good quality links. Firstly, create good quality content that other sites want to link to. Secondly, seek links which have your keyword phrases in the anchor text, that is, links that explain with relevancy the nature of your content. Thirdly, get links that link exactly to the page that has the content that is relevant to the page that the incoming links are from. Finally, in the same way that a reference to your offline article from a well know professor on your subject is worth more than lots of references by his students, so too is one good link from a reputable site of relevance to your website subject than lots of links from completely irrelevant link farms.

Tags: links, SEO

This entry was posted on Friday, August 17th, 2007 at 8:24 am and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.