Forum Moderators: martinibuster
With that being said...
2 years ago I wrote an article. It went hot on
one of the "low end" social media sites and I got
a smidgen of traffic.
Flash forward to a few weeks ago. A newspaper columnist
from the UK (the "Life and People" section)wrote an article.
In the article he wrote about the same topic. He then mentioned
my article, gave me a link back (anchor text was my domain name)
to my article and then paraphrased my article.
Is this considered a "quality link" ?
1. It is coming from a "relevant site" in which the author
speaks about a "relevant topic"
2. It is coming from a major newspaper (albeit outside the US)
I'm not sure what to think.
Again, my link profile is somewhat weak, so go easy on me....
thanks
Congrats.
Not trying to be narcissistic here, but I already know
that I am an excellent writer. I had to get a restraining
order against the people from the Nobel Literary commission.
They wouldn't stop handing out the kudos to me :P
The other reason I asked this question was because my
website is in America and the newspaper website is in the UK.
Was wondering if that could have anything to do with devaluing
the worth of the link. Coupled with the fact that I wasn't
on "page 1" of the newspaper, I thought that perhaps it wasn't
that strong of a link.
The value of your new link depends on your competition. Everything about links is context--your competition.
relatively, yes;
Academic citation literature has been applied to the web, largely by counting citations or backlinks to a given page. This gives some approximation of a page's importance or quality.
[infolab.stanford.edu...]
i would add that the quality of the links pointing back to the site would also determine it's quality:
PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value.
[google.com...]
which would leave us to define what is classified as quality. google gives a snap shot of what is not quality when defining link schemes:
Your site's ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating. The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity. However, some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google's webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact your site's ranking in search results. Examples of link schemes can include:* Links intended to manipulate PageRank
* Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
* Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging ("Link to me and I'll link to you.")
* Buying or selling links that pass PageRank
[google.com...]
so one step towards finding quality would be to avoid these types of links; however, there are still some sites that me be of higher 'quality' than others.
matt cutts illustrates a quality link by citing examples:
“The approach I’d recommend in that case is to use solid white-hat SEO to get high-quality links (e.g. editorially given by other sites on the basis of merit).”
[mattcutts.com...]
and the amount of quality links pointing to a site that distributes 'editorial' links can give you a clearer idea as to what is defined as quality. i would define 'editorial' as something that would have to be edited; probably most importantly by a 3rd party. so i think the more control you have over securing the link - social media submissions, ffa directories, excessive recips - the less quality that is apportioned to that link.
