How are backlinks rated? Let me explain... Is a backlink counted with individual links or are they counted per website with one link. I'm confusing myself If I have multiple links example in this forum, are all of these counted as individual backlinks? or is forums.digitalpoint just counted as one? Thanks, Mike FreeBundles.com - Free Electronics & More! TargetHitz.com - Maximize Your Marketing!
I imagine from forums at least that they would only count so many, maybe not just one but not all. Im not sure myself though.
backlinks are counted per page and their quality seems to be guaged by the relevance of the site they appear on and the anchor text (what it says between <a href......> and </a>)
Correct. Also, the PR of the site they come from counts. Of course, IBLs are weighted more heavily when coming from authority, .gov and .edu sites. Another major thing is HOW MANY LINKS are on the page it's coming from. If a page with 100 links has my link on it, the link is going to count a lot less than from the same page containing only 5 links. From another forum post: http://forums.seochat.com/link-popularity-43/link-building-101t-124545.html
Sort of a tangential comment... Just logically, it would seem like search engines could reduce the weight of the next link from the same site... I.e., you could pretty easily construct a seemingly logical formula that would count the next link only 95% of the previous link. I have no thought-out theory or hard data or anything that suggests this is true. But when I hear about search engines using hundreds of variables in their ranking (this comment made by the director of Yahoo's research group to a group of computer science Ph.D.'s they were recruiting from last year) I wonder, hey, what are those other variables? Sorry this is sort of ineloquent. Hopefully anyone interested understands what I'm trying to say...
According to some informal research Rand recently did; Only the first Anchor text counts As for site-wide links of link placements many search engines use Page Segmentation strategies - ie; where on the page it is located can have a dampening on it (ie; footer and side panel - or site wide links) Even further to that there are temporal scoring factors as well when considering link valuations. These methods can also be found in the recent re-release of; Information retrieval based on historical factors Some Snippets from that Anyways... you get the idea.... (dig through for more goodies).... Link valuations should be based on a wide variety of factors that the average SEO enthusiast really doesn't take into account.... You could even glean goodies from patents such as; Phrase Based Indexing and Retrieval - more on link scoring there as well.... In short, because Google is a link centric nodal system (PageRank) many of the additional algorithmic ranking signals are based in part, or related to the treatment of links....