Links, get lots of them, get good ones
June 20, 2008
Links pointing to your site are probably the most important variable affecting your website’s ability to rank in the search engines.
Let’s say you are a Google engineer and you collected data about 25,000,000 websites that seem to be relevant to the keywords “fast car”. 25 Million websites is a lot, how are you going to decide which of those you are going to display first?
This is what you do: you use all the data you gathered to find out how many links there are out there pointing to each one of the 25,000,000 websites. The algorithm considers a link as a vote of popularity. The more links (votes) one website has, the more perceived quality that website has.
So, from all those 25M websites, the one that has more links pointing to it will rank, number 1 on the search engines. Is it that simple? Of course not, but I purposefully simplified it to illustrate the point and help you understand the way the algorithm operates.
Now that you understand this, let’s add a few things to it:
· It’s not just the amount of links pointing to a website, but also the relevancy to the topic on the websites containing those links
· It’s not just the amount of links pointing to a website, but also the popularity of the websites on the links containing those links
· It’s not simply the quality of a link, but also the code behind the link tag
· It’s not just the amount of links one website acquires but also the pace at which those links were accumulated
All these factors are computed into an algorithm that provides each domain with certain value of Link Equity.
The highest the link equity of any given domain, the more chances it has to rank high in the search engines.
Of course you’ll also need to take into account the trustrank and usability factor.
