Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Why would this be the second most relevant page on the site? There is nothing on the page except some outbound links.
The domain name receives equal mention on every page of the site (in the page title), so there is no reason to prefer one page over another.
For me this is evidence in the absence of any other relevant factors Google picks pages that have outbound links on them.
Anyone got other examples?
My home page has a PR of 3 (that had better change soon). All of the other 1400+ pages have a PR of 2, except the links page, which also is PR3.
So definitely outbound links seem to play a role but I can't understand the logic behind it.
Why would you present a site to the user which links to a site with the content instead of the site the content is on?
greg
So definitely outbound links seem to play a role but I can't understand the logic behind it.
Why would you present a site to the user which links to a site with the content instead of the site the content is on?
I think the logic is: spammers, SEOs etc know about PR and avoid giving many genuine outbound links. When they do they're normally reciprocal.
Real authority sites built for the user either don't know or don't care about PR. They just link to whatever the user will find useful.
So a page with non-reciprocal outbound links is more likely to be a genuine resource.
My feeling is that it makes sense to give some weight to outbound links, but with this update they've turned the knob up way too far.
That'll teach you to buy page rank! HAHAHA!
But seriously, this is googles way of forcing websites to link out to other similar sites without using redirects and javascript links that googlebot can't follow.
So they are rewarding pages that link to other pages. I seen this coming a few months back when I was analyzing the top 10 sites for a popular money term. I noticed that all the top 10 pages had that one thing in common.
They all linked to pages about the word that I searched for. Whether the links were internal pages on the site or external pages on other sites it didn't matter but they all had links to other pages about the word I searched for. With the word in the anchor text of the links out.
But it doesn't seem to me that it's working very good because the results kinda stink. I can still find what I need but I have to click through a couple pages to get there.
I had the same prob just after florida and couldn't understand the choice of the indented listing until I realised that the page in question had every synonym you could think of for the second word of domain.
ie www.keyword-somethingelse.com
Makes sense to me.
I think it makes sense that google would rank a site with outbound links higher. If nobody had outbound links besides DMOZ how would googlebot find anything new?
How do you put a "nofollow" tag on a link?
<a href="http..." rel="nofollow">
SOD,
A lot of times when you do large link campaigns you get people who don't really understand what you're asking them to do in the exchange and they link to the main link page, or even the page you put them on.
Aside from that, it may be because A)You have some relevant outbounds that google likes, B) You cover a gamut of words that are semantically simlar to your keyword, or C)Some combination of A and B and maybe the link thing too.
I looked at the links. they are not relevant in any possible way to the query I made.
I think that in this case a meaningless query shows up something in the algorithm.
GoogleGuy said:
...I would definitely agree that it helps users to link to useful, relevant, related sites. So I could see where someday we might our scoring to reflect that in some part. If you see tons of links flowing into a site and not a single link to the rest of the web, then as a user I might scratch my head a little bit.
Good, relevant links are one of things that make a site valuable. Google wants to give the user valuable results. So it's logical, that on-topic outbounds to high-ranked sites may be perceived by Google as positive factor for page. It's easy to be analyzed automatically and is something that makes difference between real pages and spam - spammers don't care about giving good outbounds, do they?
A few days ago I found that links page in one of my sites ranked in top 5 of the SERPS under term "Golden Widget", while it had nothing else, but one text link to the Official Golden Widget Website with link text "Golden Widget".
Rewarding outbounds, Google makes first step into the world, where will be no difference between SE optimization and building a good site - now I'm adding outbounds to best on-topic pages on my sites, because this will never be penalized, and makes page better for users and by the way for Google.
spammers don't care about giving good outbounds, do they?No, but they sure DO care about their ranking, if outbound links is used for the ranking, they will use and abuse it.
Sure there may be a few cases that suggest there is evidence that Google likes outbound links, but I could easily point out a few sites that rank high and have few or no outbound links.
they will use and abuse it
Indeed, but there is a catch: they became something better than just spammy sites, if they include several good links. Unless they'll hide them, of course - but hiding links is so easy to detect and such a site is likely banned.
Sure there may be a few cases that suggest there is evidence that Google likes outbound links, but I could easily point out a few sites that rank high and have few or no outbound links.
Clearly, there are more important factors, however right now G takes this factor too seriously.
I described before the situation about "Golden Widget", but today I found another would-be example - some months ago I launched a new, non-commercial site about "Dreamy Widgets" and did some white hat SEO in it. I have gained a few inbounds from blogs of my friends (not in comments, of course, but links made deliberately by the owners).
Today I checked results for query "Dreamy Widgets", my site didn't appear too high yet, but I found one of the blogs linking to my site higher than the site itself - while the only text about "Dreamy Widgets" on this blog is in the link to my site. I think it's mostly because of PageRank, but it can be also because linking to my on-topic site (which is lower in results, because has lower PR, or exists for shorter period of time, who knows).
Anyway, I found this situation very interesting.
Unless they'll hide them, of course - but hiding links is so easy to detect and such a site is likely banned.
No need to hide them, just camouflage them to look like regular text.
I think moves like this will eventually bring about a situation where it's easier to build a decent site than to produce spam.
tweaking knobs for something?
-kpaul
But for the spammer, wouldn't outgoing links have to be on topic? This means doing some work for any subject they are spamming.
Nah, just run a query for the keyphrase you're working on, scrape the results, and put the links in with the keyphrase. Program it once and you're done.
The simple fact is a links page is a Hub Page.
Of the many factors (rumored 100 or so) that Google looks at, one is "is this a hub page?" Another is "is this an authority page?" They are sort of opposites. But both types can do well in different search circumstances.
Google has been giving points to Hubs for for years.
In my case the 2nd page has just login form on it and a logo linking to home page. But this page has more links from other sites than home page or any other page.
So its number of inbounds not outbounds that is used by google to decide the second listing.
In your case reciprocal partners might have linked to your reciprocal linking page.
How am I going to achieve it?
All outbounds link to authority sites, and all inbounds are not reciprocal, unless an authority site would link to me, after finding how useful information about their stuff my site provides.
The outbounds aren't meant just for G, but above all they're for users, each page contains information about certain item and links to official on-topic website. This is the way to satisfy them and make more possible they'll give more inbounds.
Inbounds I have got so far are here because my friends find the site useful, not because I paid them with backlinks.
If G weren't rewarding outbounds, I'd hide authority sites outbounds in JavaScript or use redirects, to minimize PR leaking, but under current circumstances it would be foolish. The bigger influence of 'hub points' in G algo makes our methods cleaner, honesty now pays off better than tricks.
