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Calculating an importance of a link

Does google look at the number of click troughs and duration of sessions...

         

new_BEE

7:43 pm on Jun 14, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



When google calculating an importance of a link:

1.Does google look at the number of click troughs and duration of sessions from that link?

2.Placement of the link ( Does a link from the bottom of a web page important as one from the top)

Thank in Advance!

SlowMove

7:54 pm on Jun 14, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



>1.Does google look at the number of click troughs and duration of sessions from that link?

imho, they could probably detect click through popularity from their own site, not other sites. they know nothing about the duration of sessions.

not sure at all about your second question.

new_BEE

7:56 pm on Jun 14, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Thanks!

doc_z

7:57 pm on Jun 14, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Every link on a page counts the same, the placement doesn't matter (only the total number of links is important for PR calculation). Also, the number of click troughs and duration of sessions don't play a role.

(At least this was the case in the past. Of course, Google could change this.)

SlowMove

8:00 pm on Jun 14, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



>Also, the number of click troughs and duration of sessions don't play a role.

is there some way they could detect click throuhs from sites other than their own?

doc_z

8:05 pm on Jun 14, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



> is there some way they could detect click throuhs from sites other than their own?

I'm not sure if they could use the Google Toolbar to collect data. (duration, clicks)

Mohamed_E

8:17 pm on Jun 14, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



new_BEE,

To understand how Google works you absolutely must read the original paper on The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine [www7.scu.edu.au]. It was written a few years ago, and probably a lot of the details have changed. Nevertheless many of us believe that it still offers an unparalleled view into the thinking that went into the design of Google.

To answer your questions: There is no evidence that Google measures either clickthroughs or duration of sessions.

new_BEE

8:21 pm on Jun 14, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



~“Every link on a page counts the same, the placement doesn't matter”~

Lets say there’s a page with 200 links and the No. 200 link is as important as the 1st one?

doc_z

8:28 pm on Jun 14, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



> Lets say there’s a page with 200 links and the No. 200 link is as important as the 1st one?

Yes, but the 'value' of each link is decreased due to the large number of links. (By the way, Google recommends to keep the number of links on a page to not more than 100.)

skipfactor

8:52 pm on Jun 14, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Every link on a page counts the same, the placement doesn't matter

A few instances where I think this would not be true:

-link on the top of the page under a keyword-rich H1 heading or text toolbar

-link at the bottom of the page above a keyword-rich disclaimer, etc.--there's usually text at the bottom of pages

-the 200th link is at the bottom of a page that's >100K.

doc_z

9:08 pm on Jun 14, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



A few instances where I think this would not be true:
-link on the top of the page under a keyword-rich H1 heading or text toolbar
-link at the bottom of the page above a keyword-rich disclaimer, etc.--there's usually text at the bottom of pages
-the 200th link is at the bottom of a page that's >100K.

I don't have seen any evidence for the first or the second point. (Also, in the original algorithm about PR calculation it doesn't matter where you place the link.)
The third point might be true. However, there was a discussion that Google shows links as backlinks well beyond 101K and '100 links' limits. [webmasterworld.com]

SlowMove

9:14 pm on Jun 14, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



still, you probably don't want a URL that starts with the letter z, regardless of what the search engines are doing.

skipfactor

9:30 pm on Jun 14, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I don't have seen any evidence for the first or the second point.

I'd say it's possible knowing Google considers a link's surrounding text.

I've made my bottom-of-the-page disclaimers a little more palatable (marketable) to the searcher since I've seen the text appear in SERP snippets. :)

new_BEE

4:57 am on Jun 15, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



-----------------------------------------------
A few instances where I think this would not be true:
-link on the top of the page under a keyword-rich H1 heading or text toolbar
-link at the bottom of the page above a keyword-rich disclaimer, etc.--there's usually text at the bottom of pages
----------------------------------------------

I also think this is true! But do you have anything to back this up?

mil2k

5:19 am on Jun 15, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I'd say it's possible knowing Google considers a link's surrounding text.

In a similar discussion before, I remember Tedster saying he did some experiments using some unique words surrounding link text and still saw no results for them. It was significant for me bcoz I was about to do the same experiments.

DeFresto

1:51 am on Jun 16, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I think I've read an interview with one of Google owners saing they are going to improve the algoritm of giving different values to links from the same page. It means they want to understand what links are the real "votes" for the linked site. May be they are using it in some kind of way right now.

skipfactor

2:36 am on Jun 16, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



But do you have anything to back this up?

No, but with internal link placement, I approach this as: you'll never be penalized for putting the most relevant link close to whatever text you can squeeze on to a link page. It may not count now, but it might tomorrow.

With external link placement, I wouldn't ask for preferred placement, but it might matter with some SEs and from a raw referral standpoint, I'd bet the top or bottom links fare better than the middle of the page.

vitaplease

9:18 am on Jun 16, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



When google calculating an importance of a link:

1.Does google look at the number of click troughs and duration of sessions from that link?

2.Placement of the link ( Does a link from the bottom of a web page important as one from the top)

Google does have (future?) ideas on these things - the questions remains how well they can be implemented or be kept spam free:

1. A Google patent: "Methods and apparatus for employing usage statistics in document retrieval" [appft1.uspto.gov]

[0036] The frequency of visit score equals log2(1+log(VF)/log(MAXVF). VF is the number of times that the document was visited (or accessed) in one month, and MAXVF is set to 2000. A small value is used when VF is unknown. If the unique user is less than 10, it equals 0.5*UU/10; otherwise, it equals 0.5*(1+UU/MAXUU). UU is the number of unique hosts/IPs that access the document in one month, and MAXUU is set to 400. A small value is used when UU is unknown. The path length score equals log(K-PL)/log(K). PL is the number of `/` characters in the document's path, and K is set to 20.

2. from Henzinger, Motwani and Silverstein: Challenges in Web Search Engines [citeseer.nj.nec.com]

To give just one example, users have grown accustomed to ignoring text on the periphery of a web page [12], which in many cases consists of navigational elements of advertisements. Search engines could use positional information, as expressed in the layout code to adjust the weight given to various sections of text in the document.