Link Based Ranking Factors

Chuck Aikenswww.eduki.com

Search Engine Algorithm

Top Organic Rankings are won by placing optimized content on a trusted domain and then promoting that website page to win direct links across the internet with a wide variety of related keywords to build link popularity.

Source: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

Site Wide Link Based Ranking Factors

Site Wide Link Based Ranking Factors1. Trust Distance2. Link Popularity3. Link Diversity4. Topical Relationship5. Temporal Growth6. Restricted TLDs7. Purity of Links

Source: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

Trust Distance

Click distance from Trusted Sites. Links from popular, trusted websites pass more value.

Link Popularity

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set.

Link Diversity

The relationship between the total number and variety of Linking Root Domains.

Open Site Explorer includes 9.2 trillion links from 92 million domains. They have crawled 42 billion URLs in past 30 days.

Topical Relationships

Links from trusted sites in the same topic or from relevant related sites.

Temporal Growth of Links

Older links are often viewed as better than newer links. Link spikes can look unnatural to search engines.

Majestic SEO has built an independent index of the internet to quantify link profile. Last crawl = 320 Billion Pages Crawled.

Domain Authority

Domain Authority predicts how well a web page will rank on a domain. The higher the Domain Authority, the greater the potential for an individual page on that domain to rank well.

Domain Authority is based on a 100-point, logarithmic scale. It is more difficult to grow your score from 70 to 80 than it would be to grow from 20 to 30.

Page Specific Link Based Ranking Factors

Page – Specific Link Based Ranking Factors1. Anchor Text2. Link Popularity3. Link Diversity4. Trust Distance – Not as important at page level5. Topical Relationship6. Internal Anchor Text

Source: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

Anchor Text of Inbound Links

The strongest page based ranking factor is anchor text.

Source: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

Anchor Text Distribution

Anchor Text should reinforce the theme of the website and contain a natural distribution of both brand and descriptive keywords.

Source: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/

Page Authority

Page Authority predicts the likelihood of a single page to rank well, regardless of its content. The higher the Page Authority, the greater the potential for that individual page to rank.

Page Authority is based on a 100-point, logarithmic scale. It is more difficult to grow your score from 70 to 80 than it would be to grow from 20 to 30.

Other Link Based Ranking Factors

• Google has stated that Restricted TLD extensions (.edu, .mil, .gov, etc) do not pass any more value than others.

• Link schemes such as links to bad neighborhoods on the web or excessive link exchanging can negatively impact your site's rankings.

• Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines. Paid links can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results.

• Nofollow was developed by Google in 2005 as a method to identify a link that should not influence the link target's page rank. Originally developed for blog comment spam and later used to clearly identify paid links.

• Google & Bing look at social signals as a ranking factor, but that those signals are weak and may only apply to “Real Time” results for now.