Link Authority SEO Ranking Factors

Domain Authority Factors

There are several measurements of domain authority from the perspective of links: the QUALITY of links pointing to a domain, the QUANTITY of links, toolbar pagerank, domain rankings on search results and domain keyword relevance to the topic. Let’s look at how each can affect the value of a link to your website:

• How quality of links that point to a domain affect a link that is pointed to your website.
  Example: www.site1.com links to you. How is a link from www.site1.com to your site affected by other links that point to www.site1.com?Trusted links to a domain that links to your site are very important. If domain X has 100 trusted links, then a link from X is more valuable than a link from Z that has 1000 trashy links. This is especially true for new websites, which have low trust profile and tend to sit in the supplemental index.
• How quantity of links to a domain affect a link coming from that domain to your website.
  Example: www.site1.com links to you. How is a link from www.site1.com to your site affected purely by the number of outside links that point to www.site1.com?This depends in part on the quality of outside links. For example, if X has 1000 links and Y has 100 links, then a link from X is more valuable — if all of those links are of equal quality. If W has 1000 trashy links and Z has 50 quality links, then a link from Z is more valuable.The game is about quality. Though paid directories still tend to work, their value is going down. I believe Google will soon completely eliminate their effect, or minimize it so much that it simply wouldn’t be worth pursuing.
• How Toolbar pagerank of a domain affects a link coming from that domain.
  Example: www.site1.com has PR 4. How does that affect a link that comes from www.site1.com to your website?Toolbar pagerank is not a real measure of Google pagerank. We know that it’s delayed for at least three months and can be adjusted by Google without real effects on search rankings. Do not trust pagerank too much; focus on link analysis instead. It’s a good general measure, but Google may be skewing it to offset link buys.
• How domain rankings on search results affect a link coming from that domain to your site.
  Example: site1.com rank #4 for “widgets.” How valuable is the link to your website, which you want to rank for “widgets” or “purple widget”?This factor is very influential. A domain ranking for your keyword has been determined by algorithms to be very valuable and worthwhile. If you want to rank for the same or similar terms, then a link from that domain is an influential vote.Example 2: site1.com ranks #2 for “purple cow.” How valuable is the link from www.site1.com to your domain, which you want to rank for “purple widget”?This is influential as long as the linking domain has high trust and authority. Topically unrelated links coming from trusted websites still pass ranking value. They indicate a vote by a linking website, and since the website is trusted, that trust is partially passed on to you.
• How does relevance of keywords within linking domain name affect your site?
  Example: www.widgets.com links to your site. How does that affect the link’s value if you want to rank for “purple wigets”?There a lot of disagreement about this. It is a fact that many domains can rank for keywords completely unrelated to their name. Perfect examples are Wikipedia and About.com. Domain keyword relevance can help, but it is not the deciding factor. Website authority and trust far outweigh this value.
• Number of Outbound Links on a Linking Page
  The less links a page linking to your website has, the more pagerank value is passed. If a page has a 100 pagerank value (example), and links to 4 other sites, then each site gets 25 points. If that same page has 20 links to other sites, than each site gets only 5 points.The higher the PR of a page (or the more quality inbound links it has), and the less links there are on that page, the juicier your link is.Quality of Outbound Links Coming from a Page That Links to Your DomainExample: site.com links to your website as well as: Microsoft.com, bmw.com and imb.com. How does the quality of Microsoft.com, bmw.com and imb.com affect your link? Assuming you have a good site, of course. If you link is sitting together with lnks to quality websites on a page (assuming the page itself has good trust and authority) it can be an indicator that you’re on the same level… it’s a cue, but it’s not likely to give you similar authority.

  URL of Linking Page

   

  Example: is there a difference between a link from:

   

  site.com/wigets/blue/example.html

  and

  www.site2.com/54fg/agsaa.phf.%dfgd3/dymamicstuff.dfg.d3.php

   

  As long as URL can be spidered and indexed, this parameter is not likely to affect the value. There are other indicators. If first and second URLs both have quality inbounds, why would search engines discriminate based only on link structure? There are plenty of good indicators that the second page is as valuable as the first one, hence a link from the second page is just as valuable as a link from the first one.

  Problems arise when content management systems use session IDs, and create different URLs to the same content.

• How Does Page Type Affect Quality of The Link?
  Do endings such as .html, .php, .asp and .pdf affect link quality?PHP, ASP, HTML and other web language extensions do not have much weight on the link. Document formats such as PDF (.pdf) and Word (.doc) seem to have different weight. There are many other factors that affect those documents, such as the inbounds and content. If a PDF has 1000 inbounds, then a link from that PDF is obviously a powerful one.Some SEOs state that .pdfs and .docs pass less link value, but you will have to test this one yourself.How Do Page Edits Affect Link Value to Your Site?Example: site.com has a link to your domain. The page from which the link comes is edited once per week. How does that affect link value?

  This is affected by other factors such as the type of query and topic. A link from a static page that has not been updated in years, but has a powerful link profile, is highly valuable. On the other hand, a link from CNN.com from a page that gets updated frequently is just as valuable. It depends on the type of website from which the link is coming. This factor is rather unimportant.

  Negative Link Factors

  Paid Link

  Google has implemented, and continues to implement, technology that detects paid links. It still does a bad job, but it may look at several factors that cue algorithms about links. Such factors may include the word “Sponsored” next to the links or completely irrelevant footer sitewide links. Once Google is alarmed, it may discount the link as paid and stop it from passing ranking value.

• Links Embedded in JavaScript
  Most SEOs agree that Search engine have a hard time spidering JavaScript. This may be changing as Google advances. Google already can crawl JavaScript forms and has actually admitted that it digs JavaScript to discover new links:We already do some pretty smart things like scanning JavaScript and Flash to discover links to new web pages - Jayant Madhavan and Alon Halevy, Crawling and Indexing TeamIf engineers from a crawling and indexing team say they crawl JavaScript, you’d better believe them. The question is, do JavaScript links pass pagerank? It would make sense to implement this, since JavaScript links are only different from HTML links in that they’re JavaScript-based! We may see this very soon.Google also fills out some JavaScript forms, so beware if some weird stranger fills out your forms in a goofy way:”…when we encounter a <FORM> element on a high-quality site, we might choose to do a small number of queries using the form. For text boxes, our computers automatically choose words from the site that has the form; for select menus, check boxes, and radio buttons on the form, we choose from among the values of the HTML. Having chosen the values for each input, we generate and then try to crawl URLs that correspond to a possible query a user may have made…”

  Page Excluded in Robot.txt file

  If a page is excluded in Robot.txt, it is no longer spidered or indexed, nor does it pass pagerank. Getting a link from a robot.txt excluded page is worthless in terms of SEO.

  In the fifth article we finish the series with the basics of on-page SEO: title tags, H tags, body, domain name, image, meta tags and more.

source: seochat.com

History of Search Engine Optimization

Webmasters and content providers began optimizing sites for search engines in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early Web. Initially, all a webmaster needed to do was submit a page, or URL, to the various engines which would send a spider to “crawl” that page, extract links to other pages from it, and return information found on the page to be indexed. The process involves a search engine spider downloading a page and storing it on the search engine’s own server, where a second program, known as an indexer, extracts various information about the page, such as the words it contains and where these are located, as well as any weight for specific words, as well as any and all links the page contains, which are then placed into a scheduler for crawling at a later date.

Site owners started to recognize the value of having their sites highly ranked and visible in search engine results, creating an opportunity for both white hat and black hat SEO practitioners. According to industry analyst Danny Sullivan, the phrase search engine optimization probably came into use in 1997.

Early versions of search algorithms relied on webmaster-provided information such as the keyword meta tag, or index files in engines like ALIWEB. Meta tags provide a guide to each page’s content. But using meta data to index pages was found to be less than reliable because the webmaster’s choice of keywords in the meta tag could potentially be an inaccurate representation of the site’s actual content. Inaccurate, incomplete, and inconsistent data in meta tags could and did cause pages to rank for irrelevant searches. Web content providers also manipulated a number of attributes within the HTML source of a page in an attempt to rank well in search engines.

By relying so much on factors such as keyword density which were exclusively within a webmaster’s control, early search engines suffered from abuse and ranking manipulation. To provide better results to their users, search engines had to adapt to ensure their results pages showed the most relevant search results, rather than unrelated pages stuffed with numerous keywords by unscrupulous webmasters. Since the success and popularity of a search engine is determined by its ability to produce the most relevant results to any given search, allowing those results to be false would turn users to find other search sources. Search engines responded by developing more complex ranking algorithms, taking into account additional factors that were more difficult for webmasters to manipulate.

Graduate students at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed “backrub,” a search engine that relied on a mathematical algorithm to rate the prominence of web pages. The number calculated by the algorithm, PageRank, is a function of the quantity and strength of inbound links. PageRank estimates the likelihood that a given page will be reached by a web user who randomly surfs the web, and follows links from one page to another. In effect, this means that some links are stronger than others, as a higher PageRank page is more likely to be reached by the random surfer.

Page and Brin founded Google in 1998. Google attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet users, who liked its simple design.Off-page factors (such as PageRank and hyperlink analysis) were considered as well as on-page factors (such as keyword frequency, meta tags, headings, links and site structure) to enable Google to avoid the kind of manipulation seen in search engines that only considered on-page factors for their rankings. Although PageRank was more difficult to game, webmasters had already developed link building tools and schemes to influence the Inktomi search engine, and these methods proved similarly applicable to gaming PageRank. Many sites focused on exchanging, buying, and selling links, often on a massive scale. Some of these schemes, or link farms, involved the creation of thousands of sites for the sole purpose of link spamming.[7] In recent years major search engines have begun to rely more heavily on off-web factors such as the age, sex, location, and search history of people conducting searches in order to further refine results.[citation needed]

By 2007, search engines had incorporated a wide range of undisclosed factors in their ranking algorithms to reduce the impact of link manipulation. Google says it ranks sites using more than 200 different signals.[8] The three leading search engines, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s Live Search, do not disclose the algorithms they use to rank pages. Notable SEOs, such as Rand Fishkin, Barry Schwartz, Aaron Wall and Jill Whalen, have studied different approaches to search engine optimization, and have published their opinions in online forums and blogs.SEO practitioners may also study patents held by various search engines to gain insight into the algorithms.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. Typically, the earlier a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.

The acronym “SEO” can also refer to “search engine optimizers,” a term adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees who perform SEO services in-house. Search engine optimizers may offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign. Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated into web site development and design. The term “search engine friendly” may be used to describe web site designs, menus, content management systems and shopping carts that are easy to optimize.

Another class of techniques, known as black hat SEO or Spamdexing, use methods such as link farms and keyword stuffing that degrade both the relevance of search results and the user-experience of search engines. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques in order to remove them from their indices.

Search Engine Marketing(SEM)

Search engine marketing, or SEM, is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) through the use of paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion. The Pay Per Click (PPC) lead Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO), also includes search engine optimization (SEO) within its reporting, but SEO is a separate discipline with most sources, including the New York Times defining SEM as ‘the practice of buying paid search listings’.

Market structure                                                                                                                                                                                                     In 2006, North American advertisers spent US$9.4 billion on search engine marketing, a 62% increase over the prior year and a 750% increase over the 2002 year. The largest SEM vendors are Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter. As of 2006, SEM was growing much faster than traditional advertising and even other channels of online marketing. Because of the complex technology, a secondary “search marketing agency” market has evolved. Many marketers have difficulty understanding search engine marketing and they rely on third party agencies to manage their search marketing. Some of these agencies have developed technology that automates bidding and other complex functions required for the Pay Per Click model. .
History
As the number of sites on the Web increased in the mid-to-late 90s, search engines started appearing to help people find information quickly. Search engines developed business models to finance their services, such as pay per click programs offered by Open Text in 1996 and then Goto.com in 1998. Goto.com later changed its name to Overture in 2001, and was purchased by Yahoo! in 2003, and now offers paid search opportunities for advertisers through Yahoo! Search Marketing. Google also began to offer advertisements on search results pages in 2000 through the Google AdWords program. By 2007, pay-per-click programs proved to be primary money-makers for search engines.

Search engine optimization consultants expanded their offerings to help businesses learn about and use the advertising opportunities offered by search engines, and new agencies focusing primarily upon marketing and advertising through search engines emerged. The term “Search Engine Marketing” was proposed by Danny Sullivan in 2001[8] to cover the spectrum of activities involved in performing SEO, managing paid listings at the search engines, submitting sites to directories, and developing online marketing strategies for businesses, organizations, and individuals.
Ethical questions
Paid search advertising has not been without controversy, and the issue of how search engines present advertising on their search result pages has been the target of a series of studies and reports by Consumer Reports WebWatch. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) also issued a letter in 2002 about the importance of disclosure of paid advertising on search engines, in response to a complaint from Commercial Alert, a consumer advocacy group with ties to Ralph Nader.

Vested interests appear to use the expression SEM to mean exclusively Pay per click advertising to the extent that the wider advertising and marketing community have accepted this narrow definition. Such usage excludes the wider search marketing community that is engaged in other forms of SEM such as Search Engine Optimization and Search Retargeting.

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