The Missing Link - Appendix 1: Linking Strategies
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This report is about sitemaps, not linking strategies. This appendix serves only as a brief introduction to linking strategy. For more information, I would recommend reading from the masters of link strategy – Michael Campbell & Leslie Rohde. You can see my review of their work here.
Overview of Link Importance
Links to pages can be done with standard text links, or image links. While many people use image links, it is often not the best choice. Links are more than just methods of navigating from one page to another. They are also used by search engines to rank pages. An image link that has nice graphics and human appeal, does not tell the search engine spider anything about the content of the page it links to. True, “alt text” can be used for this, but search engines often don’t give this as much importance as perhaps they should.
A text link not only provides a route to another page, it also uses text to define what that page is about.
Consider this link:
Barbie Doll Collectible Books
Buy early first edition Barbie Doll books. Barbie doll collector’s guides, magazines & Barbie memorabilia.
A search engine spider can follow it and find the page about “Barbie Doll Collectible Books” and therefore index that page. However, the spider also uses the text in the link to help decide what that page is about, even before it visits. In this case the spider expects a page about “Barbie Doll Collectible Books”. If it finds that the page has title tag, headers and body text about “Barbie Doll Collectible Books”, then the fact that the text link also had those keywords, gives that page a boost in what Leslie Rohde calls “Link Reputation” (See Revenge of the Mininet resource at the end of this report for more info).
If 100 pages all link to the Barbie Doll Collectible Books page using this same link text, Google is going to think – great, this page is about Barbie Doll Collectible Books. If someone searches Google with this as the search text, there is a good chance this page will rank highly because of a high Link Reputation for this term.
Where does Page Rank (PR) come in?
Well, I am glad you asked. PR is something Google dreamed up. Basically a page is ranked according to how important Google thinks it is. Calculation of PR is complicated, but in simple terms, the more pages that link to your page, the higher the PR of your page.
Each link to your page is a vote for your page.
But, “votes” from pages that Google deem important (high PR), will count for more than “votes” from low PR pages. For example, it is probably better to have one link pointing to your site from a PR 7 page, than 20 links pointing to your site from PR 1 or 2 pages. So, the quality of the links are taken into account when PR is calculated for your pages. The size of the vote comes from the PR of the page that votes for you.
If you have one link on a PR7 page to another page, the full PR 7 is passed on to the other page (not as simple as this, but it is easy to think this way for this example). If you have 2 links on the PR 7 page, then half of the PR is passed to both pages. Each page will get a 3.5 PR vote. If you have 10 links on a page, each of the linked pages get 1/10 of the PR7 i.e. 0.7 passed to them.
Next: How Can We Use this Knowledge? >>
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