Sunday, September 26, 2010

Linking for the right reasons.

Are you linking for the right reasons?
With the Google update Mayday, the whole landscape of linking changed.
Although Google stated that Mayday was for "higher quality sites to surface for long tail" it was more than that. 
Googler Matt Cutts who said, when asked during Q&A,  ”this is an algorithmic change in Google, looking for higher quality sites to surface for long tail queries. It went through vigorous testing and isn’t going to be rolled back.”
Vanessa Fox pressed for more information and they replied, "it was a rankings change, not a crawling or indexing change"
The 3 categories were named.
  1. Indexing - Your results in the search pages.
  2. Crawling - How often your pages are visited.
  3. Ranking - PageRank
The only thing the algo change affected was PageRank. Only one thing, but it was a huge change.

PageRank used to be based on the linked page getting a percentage of the linking page's pr based on a mathematical formula.
Simplified this is (PR of linked site=.85 x Linking Page PR / (divided by) the number of outgoing links.)
A Link on a PR5 website would give you 4.25 in PR points if you were the only link on the page. If there were 3 links on the page you would get 1.46
This is gone. The PR rating of the page does not enter into the calculations anymore.
PR is calculated according to an unknown formula which factors relevance between linking and linked pages.
From experience I know that low or PR0 pages have the ability to pass on much higher PR.
With 115 links calculated, I went from a PR0 to a PR4 when PR was calculated.
Of the 115 links, one was on a PR5 page, one on a PR3, and 113 on PR0 pages.
However, the PR0 Pages were extremely relevant, all being about SEO and linking to my SEO information website.
This was done on a new site done after Mayday.
Before Mayday, my DCP website achieved a PR3 with over 500 links.
This tells me that picking the best linking places have changed.
Before, it was advisable to find high PR pages, now the PR points awarded are based on the relevance of the 2 pages.
Linking plans now should be based on traffic and no real consideration given for search standings.

If a paid link is going to bring traffic, then use it.
I would still watch out for "bad neighborhoods" as these will not bring you much (any) traffic.
If you are building links to boost your PageRank, concentrate on placing links on pages with content relevant to your website's.
Again, plan your linking for traffic.


best,
Reg
http://NBS-SEO.com

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