Link Basics - the fundamental information you need to know to understand what links are and how you can best use them to effect your position in the search engines.
To start with, there are 7 concepts which you need to understand. They are the following:
- Anchor Text
- Inbound links
- Outbound links
- Reciprocal links
- Traingular linking
- Link Popularity
- Search Engine Algorithm
Anchor Text - the visible text in a link.
Let’s take a look at a link - What is search engine optimization This linked text is a link to the Search Engine News sales page located at www.searchenginehelp.com/sales. What interests us about this code is that it leads to a particular page and that it uses text other than the actual URL (in our case Search Engine Optimization). This visible link text is known as anchor text. The search engines in general, and Google in particular, lend a great deal of significance to the anchor text when determining search rankings. As such getting your keywords into the visible, or anchor, text of the links pointing towards your site is one of the most important elements of high-ranking web pages.
Inbound LinksAn inbound link is a link from another site pointing towards one of your web pages.
Outbound links
An outbound link is a link on one of your web pages that points to a web page on someone else’s website.
Reciprocal Links
Whenever two sites agree to link to one another it is said that they are exchanging links, or that they have reciprocal links. At one time gaining a lot of reciprocal links was a good way to boost one’s rankings in the search engines. However, this system became greatly abused with many sites working hard to exchange links solely for the purposes of ranking well in the search engines. As a result, the search engines have greatly devalued the value of a reciprocal link, preferring one-way, inbound links. Still, there are times when exchanging links has some value, such as when you exchange links with "important" web sites.
Triangular Linking
Sometimes three different websites will attempt to "outsmart" the search engines by linking to each other in such a way that none of them "reciprocate" the link that they receive. For instance, site A may link to site B, site B to site C and site C to site A. That way each of the sites receives a one way inbound link. The search engines are rarely fooled by such schemes and will often penalize sites that participate in them. Remember, the search engines have available to them a great deal of cash and talent which they can dedicate to exposing and undermining such schemes. It is not for nothing that they hire computer science engineers with PhD’s from the top universities.
Link PopularityLink
popularity measures the sheer number of incoming links to a website. The search engines used to place a great deal of importance on link popularity when determining search results based on the assumption that quality web pages attracted a large number of incoming links. However, as websites began to take advantage of this fact and engage in various schemes to attract hundreds, if not thousands, of irrelevant incoming links, the search engines placed less importance on link popularity alone and started to also evaluate the quality of each incoming link.
Search Engine Algorithm
Each search engine has a set (or a number of sets) of preset rules which it employs to determine which sites show up for any given search query as well as the order that those sites appear in. These rules are known as an algorithm, and each search engine employs it’s own, unique algorithm. One of the more famous algorithms is Google’s PageRank which, roughly speaking, measures the importance of any given webpage. Today there are a number of newer algorithms which one should also be aware of, such as Hilltop, LocalRank, Latent Semantic Indexing and more. Almost all of these new algorithms relate to evaluating the quality of an incoming links, as links are one of the most central factors used in the search engines algorithms (this is particularly true with regards to Google). Needless to say, it is extremely important to keep abreast of the changes that the search engines make to their algorithms as these changes affect the strategies and techniques one needs to employ to rank well in the search engines.
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