Page Rank and Possible Changes in Link Scoring

[tedster]

Google mentioned that they changed something about link scoring in February 2012 - enquiring minds would like to know more!

Bill Slawski, patent maven extraordinaire, has published a new article [seobythesea.com] where he combs through recent Google patents for clues. He came up with a list of bullet points for ways that Google patents have claimed link scoring might be modified.

Personal Biasing of PageRank
Links on the Same Domain - might be ignored
Links on the Same Server - might be ignored
Geographic Locations – might be increased if different authors link in a number of locations
Links from Home Pages – might count more
Links from more recently modified pages – might count more
Text in Links – the score for the page might be made higher for that query
Text Adjacent to Links – the score for the page might be made higher for that query
Relative Importance of a Link - near the top may count more
Real Usage Data - might improve accuracy

That's a lot to think about when we are comparing backlink profiles! It's also more than we can easily "control". In my opinion, too much effort to control all these factors may even create a spam signal and trigger a penalty!

[mike2010]

Interesting side-points that most SEO experts typically ignore or are unsure if they really make a difference or not.

[tedster]

There certainly are a lot of "mights" in the patent language, and with good reason. I can imagine that same IP or same server links would not all be treated the same, for example.

[tedster]

We've got a well-developed discussion about changes in link scoring in our Link Development forum. Let's take further discussion there: [webmasterworld.com...]