2.2. I Have This Friend
By the greatest of coincidences, I have a friend (it’s always “a friend”) that has a site that is all about porcupines. Furthermore, she has an excellent page in that site about the mating habits of porcupines...
... a prickly issue, I agree!
How would a Search Engine use linking to decide what’s relevant and good? Good timing, because here comes someone who is typing “porcupine mating” into Google’s search box...
Suppose that you, Ms. Google, find 20 pages about “porcupine mating.” The on-page criteria help you figure out the relevance of each page , but that does not deliver any guarantee of the quality of the information.
SIDEBAR
Heavily SEO’d pages are usually pretty poor, actually. How many spammy
results have you encountered in Top 10 positions for your search queries
over the years?
So you proceed to analyze the off-page criteria.
SIDEBAR
SEs don’t do it sequentially like this (on-page, then off). However,
this explanation, while simplistic, holds up.
“Inbound links” is one of many off-page criteria. You look at the sites that link to my friend’s site to more accurately determine relevancy and to get your first indications of quality. (Relevance + Quality = Reality, your #1 SE Mission).
Let’s continue this example to understand how engines “weight” various inbound links...
How about if you (the engine) could see that more pages from all kinds of sites link to my friend’s porcupine mating page (and/or the rest of her site)? Everything else being equal, that would probably give the edge to my friend’s page. After all, you might as well send the searcher to the more overall-popular page, right?
Of course.
What about if many of those sites were from zoos? Better. After all, zoos are less likely to be related to reproducing cacti, for example, and are more likely to have something about the “Erethizontidae” family.
What if those sites were about porcupines? Even better! Now you’re getting somewhere!
What if the single most important site in the whole world about porcupines linked to my friend’s Web page? Wow, that’s fantastic. And it would be even better if it linked from its home page. It would be the absolute best if that was the only link to another Web site from its home page!
What if 100 of the best porcupine sites all did the same, linking from their home pages? Whoops! Now that is the best.
And your friend’s page about porcupine sex would get extra brownie points if many of those links came INto this page from other pages about the, uh, reproductive habits of porcupines. More points, too, if “porcupine mating habits” is contained in the text of the incoming link, or near it.
Bottom line?
The more sites that link to a site, and the more important they are, and the closer they are to the theme of that site, even to the topic of individual pages, the more “popularity points” for that site (and page).
SIDEBAR
In general, “link popularity” refers to the number of
in-pointing links to a site.
On the other hand, link reputation is more a measure of the value of a link. For example... Did that link come from a site that is credible (i.e., have plenty of in-pointing links)? Is that link from a site that contains content on a similar or related theme?
It’s not the sheer number of links that matters, but the quality and the topic of the linking sites. Hundreds of links from off-topic, sub-par Web sites have relatively little value. A few credible links from related Web sites are worth way more.
MYLW: <<2.1. The Power Of Porcupines 2.2. I Have This Friend 2.3. It’s Just Common Sense>>
