Search Engine Optimization & Link Analysis: Link Popularity and Link Authority

In their ongoing battle to overcome spamming the search engines are placing more and more emphasis on link analysis because it is a lot more difficult to fool the search engines. Not all links are equal. Search engines place emphasis on good quality, high authority, and topic related links.

Anybody can make a site popular just be creating hundreds of web pages all of which link to the main page but none need contain any worthwhile information. Now if these hundreds of web pages all covered good and similar topics to the one to which they were linked then the linked to site would not only be popular it would have authority.

High link popularity and authority is normally but not always a prerequisite to get an improvement in Google PageRank.

Beware of the FFA (free for all) web linking sites and similar sites offering to get you 1,000 links in 24 hours for only $30 etc etc. Google is aware of this spam technique and may well apply the zero PageRank factor to penalize sites using these services. It was pointed out in a previous chapter that Google is aware of and records the source of the link as well as the destination of the link.

An interesting experiment was carried out some time ago that highlights the power of backlinking and how it can be abused. Simultaneously a large number of determined web users all linked back to Microsoft.com using the words Go to hell or something similar. Sure enough when the search query Go to hell was used Microsoft.com came up as number 1 SERP. This technique became known as Google bombing.

Google possibly overcame this problem by carefully checking what was earlier discussed namely matching link text with text in the destination web page and source page and giving more importance in its algorithm to matching situations.

Lets take a look at the garden ponds SERPs again to take another step forward in our learning process and try to understand why some web sites might outdo others based upon linking parameters.

The table below is a summary of the important parameters for these SERPs:

Keywords information

URL in rank order (best to worst) Total inward links Total all words on page Total on page In Title In link text In actual link In header In body text

• Patio-garden-ponds 20 99 5 1 0 1 2 0

• Gardenponds 204 738 4 1 0 0 0 2

• Pondmarket 224 1714 1 1 0 0 0 0

The number 1 result had fewer links than number 2 and number 3. It also had a poor keyword use in link text although it did use the keyword in the link itself. So why did it get to the top position. I do not know for certain but 1 of the 20 links back to its site came from a very high authority called dmoz.org (Google PageRank = 10 for this site which belongs to the Open Directory Project). Numbers 2 and 3 did not.

This was probably highly significant.

Lets continue with popularity and authority.

Link analysis continued