Does Google count Gmail links?

Do links in emails count toward rankings?

[thrasher141]

Every time I put a link in an email (I use Gmail), I wonder if Google is tracking it. Does the link text matter? Does it count toward rankings? If so, it could have pretty big implications for spam. I could possibly see Gmail links counting a tiny bit, but not nearly as much as a link on a site. Does anybody know the answer to this?

[SanDiego Art]

I doubt this has any effect since emails you send (through Gmail or any other mail program) aren't available for search engine spiders. They are emails, not webpages. Including links in your email can help you increase traffic to your website if the visitor decides to click, but this doesn't affect rankings.

[thrasher141]

Google certainly does have access to the content of emails sent through Gmail - every message goes through their servers! My question is whether they choose to use any of that data, specifically the hyperlinks.

[theBear]

Google says they count links from web pages.

Why don't you pose that question to Google and see what they say.

Or in the altenative make up a page about some unknown phrase, put it in a directory with other pages but with no inbound links to it.

Then send your gmail account some emails containing a link to that page and see what happens.

[thrasher141]

Good ideas, Bear. I'll report back on what I hear, in anything. But just curious, why do you say to put the page in a directory with other pages? Why would it matter if it was in a new directory?

[jimh009]

I highly doubt that links are counted in gmail. First, it isn't a web page "per se".

And second, think about it - the last thing Google wants to do is to invite a flood of yet more spam, spam that isn't pitching viagra for a change but instead backlinks. Counting backlinks that appears in gmail would be a open invitation to a flood of spam from desperate webmasters trying improve their backlink counts.

[JayC]

>> Google says they count links from web pages.

And they also say, in the Gmail Terms of Use, that they "will not use any of your content for any purpose except to provide you with the Service."

It seems very unlikely to me that they'd use links that could be found in emails in any way in search rankings. Not only would the value of doing so be questionable in terms of improving quality of the results, but technologically it wouldn't fit into most of the established approaches (taking into consideration patents, publicly released documents, and the canon of IR techniques) that it can be safely assumed they do use. How would email content fit into the web map? Since there are no incoming links to email documents, how could they be assigned a PageRank? Or an authority score? Etc., etc.