Web Links from the Search Engine's Perspective
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Webmasters often try to raise their ratings in the search engines by using Web links. They are not always successful. In order to make this strategy work, you need to know what kind of weight the search engines give to various kinds of Web links. To understand that, it helps to know how a search engine views Web links in the first place. Barry Schwartz provides insight into what the search engines see as "natural" and "unnatural" linking.
I write this as I fly back to New York from the Search Engine Strategies Conference in Stockholm, Sweden of 2004. Scandinavia is one of the emerging search engine optimization markets, with much growth over the past six months and enormous anticipated future growth. At this time, many are new to the SEO game.
Web links is an area where there is often confusion and anxiety for novices. Therefore, this article will discuss how search engines interpret Web links, as opposed to how a Web user might interpret Web links. The information below is my personal understanding of the true meaning of links from the search engine's perspective. As many of you know, only the search engine engineers themselves truly hold the answer to these questions. However, for purposes of this article, I will be conveying this information in a fairly simplistic manner, by staying away from the algorithmic definitions and taking a painless and layman approach.
By the end of this short article you should be able to understand:
- What Web links are.
- The difference between incoming links and outgoing links.
- The different terminology used in the SEO community to describe some links.
- How search engines view links.
- What links represent to the search engines (natural vs. unnatural linking).
Next: Basics Web Link Definition >>
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