Links and Search Engines: How Search Engines Use Link Analysis
09:09 AM - Dec 19, 2001
SearchDay’s latest newsletter, How Search Engines Use Link Analysis, covers how some of the search engines figure out importance (or lack of importance) of links for their rankings. As Danny Sullivan points out, it’s quality, not quantity, that matters.
So how do the search engines figure out the quality? This newsletter, by guest writer Eric Ward, explains how relevance matters and what site owners can do to help their rankings. Topical directories are a good example of relevance, where a Free For All links page won’t help your search engine rankings. Here’s an excerpt of what Eric Ward suggests:
- Seek links from good pages that are related to the terms you want to be found for.
- Remember that while search engines make use of link analysis, they do not rely on it 100%. They still look at your site, too. So, make sure your site includes the terms you want to be found for.
- Identify good sites to link to yours by using search engines and your key search terms. Review the pages at the top of the results. See if any of the sites in the results will link to your site.
- It’s important to build links to the same URL, i.e., if your site is nike.com, variants of that are www.nike.com or nike.com/index.html. It is better if all links point to the same URL, rather than to variants of the same URL.
- Affiliate links and redirect links typically do not factor into link popularity for your site, since they are linking to the affiliate management site, not yours.
The newsletter goes into lots more, and I also wholeheartedly recommend a subscription to SearchDay, edited by Chris Sherman for Search Engine Watch. And by the way, while there’s tons of valuable information at Search Engine Watch, as a paid member to Search Engine Watch, you get an even more detailed newsletter and access to lots more information at the site.