Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
PageRank of the linking page, one of the most important factors, determines how much valuable importance is passed on to your page.
The higher the PageRank of the page linking to you, the higher the value you get.
Each link to your Web site is considered a vote. If your neighbour states in public that you are very trustworthy, or that you are his best friend (Google PageRank 2), this is of course a less important vote than when the President of your country says the same (Google PageRank 9).
Number of links on the linking page
The value your web page gets from a linking page is equal to the total PageRank value of that page divided by the total number of outgoing links on that page.
Getting a link from a PR4 page that has only 20 outgoing links is much better than getting a link from a PR4 page that has 60 outgoing links.
With the same philosophy, it is better to get a link from a PR2 link page that has only 10 outgoing links than getting a link from a PR4 page that has over 100 outgoing links.
It is therefore as important to evaluate the total number of outgoing links on a links page, as it is, to evaluate the PR of the linking page.
This is where many people often falter, as they usually insist on getting a link from a high PR page, but if that page has 100 outgoing links, your page would only get 1/100th of that value.
what are your views?
Define better. Better for your PageRank? Sure. Better for your rankings? Not necessarily. The page with 60 outgoing links might have a lot of links on your topic, whereas the page with 20 outgoing links might not be relevant to your website. The days of just looking for the best PageRank value are over - get links from (authorative) pages relevant to yours.
That's an important distinction you just made there, Robzilla.A specific link could be good for PR but lousy for rankings.Thanks.
So when evaluating a potential link partner,i will consider these parameters:
1)PR of his link page.
2)Number of links on that page(although this could increase,depending on the rate of which this webmaster is acquiring new links.Therefore it wouldn't be a bad idea to check the age of that website).
3)Topic relevancy.
4)General vibes i'm picking up from that website - order,organization etc..
Anything else?
On the subject of the amount of links a page has, I think I would rather be on a PR5 page with 30 links related to my website than on a PR5 page with 4 links related to my website. The page with 30 links on the topic is, I believe, more likely to be seen as an authority resource. Well, preferably, I'd like to be on both of course ;-)
With the same philosophy, it is better to get a link from a PR2 link page that has only 10 outgoing links than getting a link from a PR4 page that has over 100 outgoing links.
Not necessarily. It is assumed--although never officially published by Google--that the toolbar PR value is the logarithmic value of the actual PR value. The logarithmic base is also not sure because it is dependent on the PR value of the highest PR sites, but a value of 7 seems a good value (If I have time to work this out I will start a thread with some mathematics to estimate the logarithmic base).
Not all PR value is transferred via the links. In the original paper of Larry and Sergei, they are talking about 85%. With this estimation we can define the number of votes passed from one page to another with the following formula:
Votes = .85 * (7^PR) / nr-of-links
First example: (PR2-10)
Votes = .85 * (7^2) / 10 = .85 * 49 / 10 = 4.165
Second example: (PR4-100)
Votes = .85 * (7^4) / 100 = .85 * 2401 / 100 = 20.4085
So having your link on the PR4-100 page is better than on the PR2-10 page.
(PR3-100)
Votes = .85 * (7^3) / 100 = .85 * 343 / 100 = 2.9155
(PR4-100)
Votes = .85 * (7^4) / 100 = .85 * 2401 / 100 = 20.4085
So if you had a weak PR4 the value of a link might be a bit above 3, whereas the value of a strong PR4 could be 20?
Or am I missing a part of the puzzle? =)
Question:
Would Google credit this link exchange as topic related?
I assume you can have a strong PR4 (closer to a PR5), or a weak PR4 (closer to a PR3), or something in the middle?
Yes, totally right. A PR4 can be anything between a PR3.500...01 and PR4.499...99 and because of the logarithmic scale there is a huge difference between the vote value such a page can transfer. My calculation was an example to show that a link from a PR4 page is in general much stronger than from PR2, even if there are more outgoing links.
If it was DMOZ I'd say yes ;-) IMO it depends entirely on how G views the links directory .
However, it would also make sense for a similar page contained within a site entirely focused on the same topic to have an even higher relevancy/authority factor.
In general, I don't think its clear how much analysis Google does on a site-wide level; certainly their SERPs seem to be focused heavily focused on the relevance of individual documents (pages). But, it would be relatively easy (and thus seems logical that Google would choose) to analyze internal link "votes" considering the topic of the page sending the link.
If they do this, a page of chocolate-related links within a jewelry site would be less valuable (less authoritative) than the same page of links within a food site. :)
Has anyone seen any hard evidence that would help us understand the extent to which Google is analyzing topic-relevance on a site-wide level, versus focusing entirely on the topic-relevance of individual documents (pages)? If so, that might provide some further clues.
"Hypertext-Matching Analysis: Google's search engine also analyzes page content. However, instead of simply scanning for page-based text (which can be manipulated by site publishers through meta-tags), Google's technology analyzes the full content of a page and factors in fonts, subdivisions and the precise location of each word. Google also analyzes the content of neighboring web pages to ensure the results returned are the most relevant to a user's query."
Whatever that means.....
Whatever that means.....
It means relevancy, which is totally different from PageRank. PageRank (which is what the OP specifically asked about) is the numerical factor determining the importance of a page itself, without looking at the content. That doesn't say anything on relevancy related to a search query. The White House website has PR10, yet this site doesn't show up in queries related to most search queries because of lack of relevancy. Yet, if you search for "President of the United States", it is #1 in the SERPs for obvious reasons. The page rank helps in this case to boost the page to #1, even if there are pages around which more often mention the sub-sentence "President of the United States". The content of pages linking to the White House website also helps to boost this site to its #1 position.
[edited by: lammert at 2:34 pm (utc) on Jan. 28, 2006]
This is what Google says about it :"Hypertext-Matching Analysis: Google's search engine also analyzes page content. However, instead of simply scanning for page-based text (which can be manipulated by site publishers through meta-tags), Google's technology analyzes the full content of a page and factors in fonts, subdivisions and the precise location of each word. Google also analyzes the content of neighboring web pages to ensure the results returned are the most relevant to a user's query."
Whatever that means.....
That's not really related to PageRank - it's a different ranking technique. It means they analyze the text on a given page as well as its structure (header tags, colors, font sizes, bolded words, etc) to determine its topic. Neighboring web pages are pages that link to or are linked from that page; if those pages are of the same topic, it's fairly safe for Google to assume your page actually is about that particular topic. In reality it's a bit more complicated than that of course.
Will it be just a or b or c or none or all three or a combination of two.
Or should i just stop asking too many questions and go ahead building a link directory with 100 categories.
When one needs a link exchange directory to draw links, there's often something wrong with the website.
Say for example that my hobby and passion is "Alien Agenda".I love the subject and i know a lot about it and can write articles about it and set up a great content site.
But my 70 year old neighbour paints on eggs for a living and guess who is the webmaster of her site?
Thats right its me.
Now how on earth am i going to create quality content for that site and who on earth would want to link to that site if not for a link exchange?
Getting that website #1 for "chocolate" might be a bit of a challenge indeed ;-)
I am sure there are people interested in egg painting. Think of all the lore there must be about decorating eggs. Search Russian eggs alone and there are 4,750,000 results. I know egg painting was just your example. But what we may think is of no interest may be huge when you are drawing from people all around the world.
Articles related to a product gives the impression that these people not only sell painted eggs, jewlery, or whatever. They are experts on the topic. Can't hurt.
Now back to our topic.
So what you are actually saying,annej,is that in order to be a successful webmaster today ,we are not only required to study programming and computer languages,but also to get highly and deeply intellectually involved with the topic of the website that we are running?
Look not only at how many sites endorse the site that is linking to you, but also how many sites endorse the page that is linking to you.
Then look at how many sites the site endoreses and how many sites the page that links to you endoreses.
You can go back further upsteam, if you intersted in developing a search engine :)
deeply intellectually involved
No it doesn't have to be intellectual. It could just be fun stuff. Just something people would want to link to.
Content is king when it comes to search engine traffic.
But my 70 year old neighbour paints on eggs for a living and guess who is the webmaster of her site?
Thats right its me.Now how on earth am i going to create quality content for that site and who on earth would want to link to that site if not for a link exchange?
Rani, If I am understanding you correctly, you are suggesting the use of link exchange as a replacement for quality content. Well, this kind of SEO is exactly what Google is trying to weed out and the reason why link exchanges are no longer as useful as they used to be. And what kind of sites would accept to exchange links with a boring, poor quality site?! The benefit from such links would probably be negligible (and rightly so!).
If the site lacks quality content and you feel you are not able to add any, I suppose it is only fair it should not rank... Personally I'd get very annoyed if I searched for something and found only boring, low quality pages that rank high only because they have exchanged links with zillions of equally boring, low quality pages.
Did it ever occur to you that a "rich content site" could be filled with lies ,propaganda,and deception?
Just stuff to think about.
It is becoming clear to me that i have a goal(as a webmaster)to achieve #1 ranking.
I have 2 ways of achieving this.One would be by a link exchange strategy (many have done this and succeeded and whoever wants proof just send me a sticky and i'll send him to a dozen of these sites.)
The other way would be by creating rich content and having people link in naturally.
Is there a moral question here?
I'm not sure I see your point. I'm not against link exchange per se (relevant links to quality sites are fine with me), I just don't like it if low quality sites rank high simply because of link exchanges with other low quality sites. (And I believe Google agrees with me here.) By all means, exchange as many links with relevant high quality sites as you can, I don't think that will (or should) hurt you. My point is, the higher the quality of your site, the higher the quality of the links you will be able to exchange. And with a high quality site with lots of high quality links it's only fair you should rank high...
In your hypothetical situation I would think it's the old lady's responsibility to write the content or find someone else to do it. You are just creating the site. If there really is an old lady she can do this unless she is senile or in terrible health.
There are too many people out there who think they can hire someone to put up a site to sell their product and the world will come streaming to their site.
When I tell them they need to:
1) continuously build their content
2) spend hours and hours searching for related sites
3) then contact the webmasters and ask for links
they don't want to do the work
