Can Google back links be considered as the most themed links?

I have read that a couple of times too

Back to the initial question, we pretty much all agree that back links reported by Google are suspicious and probably a random selection (even if obviously, google know all of them).

But what criteria do you use to measure the value of a link ?

Of course, we have the well known criteria:

Link page is indexed
Link page has a <title> compatible with the anchor text
Link page has relevant back links (prererably .edu or .gov sites)
Back links to the link page have the right anchor text
Link page does not have too many links
...

Today, it seems that a few excellent quality back links are worth more that hundreds of poor quality links


The best criteria I can think of to appreciate the quality of a link is the following:

Search google for a keyword of interest
Look in the results if the page is listed in the top 100 or so results
If so, the link page is very relevant for this keyword

I've tried to do that a couple of times, but the link pages were never in the top 100 results :-(

Does anyone have a better solution ?

 

backlink building has changed greatly of late. Ther is now and in the future will be a lot more weight on relevance.

 

Exactly. And that is the key to "good" and 'bad" links. Not whether they are reciprocal or one way or triangulated. Not whether they come from .edu sites or .info sites or any other type of site. Not whether they are .asp or .php or .html pages...

Relevance to the theme of the page.

 

Spot on, it's actually quite worrying the number of people claiming to be SEO's that claim that Pagerank is derived from something other than the PR of linking pages and that it's possible to manipulate which backlinks Google show etc etc.

 

No doubt it's scaring the hell out of all those text link brokers and article brokers too who are still doing their best to convince people that buying links and posting duplicate content is the way to boost SE rankings.

 

LOL, Can't complain though really, it just makes things easier for the rest of us.

 

I dont think Google backlinks can be considered the most themed links for any site. I'd like to give an example from my cooking site.

I have not started any links campaign for this website nor done many directory submissions for the website. I am promoting it in the sig below, and now Google shows many links to the site from DP, which are not themed at all.

Have a look at link:www.cook-it-all.com

 

Riosiee, I think you have misunderstood what is being said. We are not saying that google displays the most themed links, we are saying that themed links are better.

The other thing to consider is that MAYBE Google IS showing what it considers to be a selection of the most relevent links, but your link building activity has dragged you into the wrong cluster!

What was it that was posted earlier 'there is more to link building than meets the eye'

 

That's the conclusion so far. But How do you measure the relevance of a link (or trust rank or whatever we call it)

Page rank is certainly not a good measure.

 

I generally look at the wider topic. For most sites it's not difficult to see what it's about. Digital Point is obviously SEO/Online Marketing themed, of course there are narrower and wider topics on certain pages that may increase or decrease the relevance of the link.

 

Relevance and trustrank are different things. To appreciate them you have to step back!

Trust rank is a system that shores up the original back rub algorithm. Links are STILL a good way to work out how important a site is, PROVIDING, you can work out how important the sites are in the beginning. I have written an article about trust rank here http://www.umbrella-consultancy.co.uk/art1-trustrank.htm

So if the BBC sports site, link to my rugby site, and I link to your football site, then there is a definite sports theme going on there right? BUT, and this is the thing here another football site might link to yours, but they have hardly any trusted links pointing to them, so even though they are more closely relevent, their link will not carry as much weight as mine!

Back further, Google use a base 5 sliding scale logarithmic algorithm. Put simply this allows them to raise of lower ANY element in the algorithm by the power of 5 (as in original value X5 X5 x5 x5 x5) so an original value on an element of say 10, could be boosted anywhere from 10 to 30,000 do you see now just how flexible the algorithm can be? So my link to you might get a boost from my trustrank.

Imagine this scenario. I link to your site, ordinary link on topic but nothing special about my link. Then something happens and the BBC link to the same page on my site that links to you WALLOP up goes the value of that link because Google knows it can trust the BBC, so it can trust me. Now if the link to my site comes from bbc.co.uk/rugby/wales.etc then that is even more themed and i might also get a theming boost as the source is trusted.

Relevance is odd it can include things like clustering, it can include things like semantics.

a page called Tiger does it again, could be relevant to tigers with stripes, or Golf couldn't it. So how do YOU work out what it is about?

The answer is simple isn't it, you can't! You need more information before you can, so WHAT information do you need? When you start to think like this, you are well on your way to building an understanding of SEO

 

Thanks

I did not know the difference between the 2 concepts. Let us call that collectively the power of a link.

Now let us extrapolate your example

I have a football page and you have linked to me from your rugby page using anchor text: 'pain reliever' because you pointed out a new pain reliever ointment explained briefly in my football page, so almost totally irrelevant with the sport. Later on, you get a link from bbc.co.uk/rugby/wales.etc

Does the link 'pain reliever' get boosted too for the search term: football ?. If so, it would imply that the linking power of a page depends primarily of the trusted backlinks it receives (wiki, .edu. bcc etc...) and not much of link relevance

Overall, I'd be looking for a way to quantify this.

Said differently: is it better to have an irrelevant link from a trusted page or a relevant link from a very relevant but not trusted page ?

 

great Questions. I know I have written this up in an article someplace, but my network is down so I can't be bothered to look for it

This is a GREAT point to understand how semantics work, thanks for raising it, so here goes.

Pain killer. If the link from my rugby site is on a page dealing with rugby injuries, first aid, pain relief etc, and the link goes to your page dealing with pain relief in sports injuries, then they are going to be seen as highly semantically linked as they are dealing with sports injuries as a whole, and both sites are associated sports, so they score well on multiple levels of semantic relevance, then that link will carry great link benefit (this is the phrase I have always used). Now a link from the same page on my site, to your home page, will likely not carry as much weight, because it is ONLY semantically linked via sport words on one level of semantic relevance. (hope I have explained that well enough)

Again step back and look at the elements of a link. Google state that they have over 100 elements (I read recently in a transcript of an interview that Larry Page said it is now over 150) they have lots of elements to their algorithm, and many people count links as one. links are NOT 1 element, they are a few of the elements that are affected by:~

position of link on anchor page
size of text
Surrounding text and links on anchor page
theme of anchor page and site
content of anchor page
anchor text in link
content of target page
PR value of anchor page
Number and destination of links on anchor page
and now we have Trust rank creeping into the equation that can alter all the above in the blink of an eye.

(I have probably missed some other elements but I am typing this off the cuff and have a busy day so don't have time to read what I have written )

SO to answer your question

I will say what I have ALWAYS said when it comes to link building. For link building to work best, and to future proof your links, you should ALWAYS (and this is amazingly simple but some ignore it) link TO and FROM the most relevant pages on sites!

When the web started, academics posted papers, and on those papers they cited OTHER papers. Within these citations that referred to other research that re-enforced the current paper were often links, and these links would go along the lines of 'doctor x stated in his recent paper called Search Engine Dat retrieval in the area covering <latent semantic indexing> that........ .

The words within the parenthesis would be the anchor text used to describe what the user would encounter if they click the link, and chances are that the link would go DIRECTLY to the page that dealt with this information, RELEVANT INFORMATION, relevant to BOTH anchor AND target pages. Now that was at the birth of the web, and now all these years later, some people STILL have not grasped the absolute basics of linking TO and FROM the most relevant pages

Are we talking currently or long term 'what is best'? Currently the web is a mess, and Google have some high level technology on the sidelines ready to wipe out a LOT of current success through link mongering. Think about it in simplistic terms, because SEO is BASIC SIMPLE stuff that involves interacting with complex technology, but the basics are STILL the core to success.

why would a link on a page full of links, on a site that has hardly any deep links to it, be sen as important? Sites like DMOZ that are in essence pages full of links, score highly because people link to categories within it all the time. NATURAL linkage results in deep links to and from relevant pages within sites. Sites that have 50,000 links to the home page, but hardly any to the inner pages, yet have 1,000 pages of outbound links are OBVIOUSLY manufactured and not natural. TTHESE are the sites that will feel it most when the new technology is brought in further into the Google algorithm!

Apologies for the long post

 

And don't forget all of the basics of Google technology were hatched in that same academic environment. If you can understand citation, you can understand at least the fundamentals of Google.

Academics can refer (or used to be able to) to a document called the Citation Index, which compiled statistics on how frequently a specific article or resource in the scientific press was cited by another article. That's basically the origins of link:

 

NOOOOOOOOO Minstrel you are WRONG


ALL this linking and web stuff is REALLY COMPLICATED AND NEW STATE OF THE ART, You need to have the 'special sauce' to be able to work it out

 

There's nothing top secret or clever about getting Google to show you more links than they do through their (delibarately broken) link: operator.

I've mentioned it at least a couple of times on here before (many moons ago).
It's just a question of queries and operators.