Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
In general, webmasters can improve a site's visibility in our search results by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to it.
This piece of text is abvious and very basic, but it was interesting for Google to say it like that out load in a clean and clear way.
1. relevant links (relevant to the topic of the page being linked to).
2. links from pages with page rank
3. links with relevant anchor text.
I think this is basically what all the SE's do, but the pagerank thing sets google apart in a very distinct way. For example, it is quite easy to get hundreds and hundreds of directory links and IMO spam your way to the top of MSN.
Such links are on "relevant" pages and have good anchor text, but they have no pagerank in most cases; therefore google's estimation is simply that such links have less value since, obviously, no one else thought those pages (the link referrers) had value either (by linking to them and passing on pagerank).
Pagerank is often criticized because webmasters in the know can manipulate the system. But the vast majority of webmasters are not "in the know", and for this reason, the pagerank system is still reasonably democratic and makes for a better system than yahoo or msn.
