Link Juice Theories

Power of unlinked URLs

[TerryZule]

So I've been working online for 7 years now, blogging full time. Never REALLY embraced linking in blogging because of the simple fact that a Wordpress blog that has allot of regular content ends up with plenty of links coming in anyway - naturally.

Fine - but I've been playing with linking and I have some questions.

I don't usually comment on blogs and competition blogs at that - I post comments on high ranking newspaper sites with home PRs ranging from 5-8.

I've been leaving my blog URL right in the commenting area and sometimes it ends up being an unlinked URL, and sometimes they actually allow a Nofollow link.

You would think the neither of these links would help my blog in the SERPS, but about a week after adding a few of these links a day, my traffic has boomed.

Question: so do unlinked URLs help if they are on HIGH ranked domains, and even stranger, can a NOFOLLOW link from a HIGH ranked domains help?

Scratching head muchly.

Thanks for reading folks.

Terry

[martinibuster]

Why has your traffic increased, what does your traffic analytics say? Are people arriving through direct navigation, which means they're typing the URL into the browser?

Have the keyword phrases used to access your site changed?

Have the amount of keyword phrases used to access your site changed (i.e. from 500 average keyword phrases to 10,000 keyword phrases)

Are visitors increasingly arriving from specific websites, have your referrers changed?

What do you mean by a dramatic increase in visitors? Is this a change from 50 visitors per day to 200 visitors per day or is it 200 visitors per day to 20,000 visitors per day?

I think we need answers to those questions in order to begin to determine the reasons why traffic is increasing. Without those answers pretty much any speculative reason is as good as any another.

[TerryZule]

The traffic is purely SERP as far as Statcounter shows. Not seeing any no referring links so that rules out the copy/paste deal.

Normal traffic was 500 page loads a day and unique visitors was 250-300, depending on which day of the week.

Now the traffic is around 1500 a day and uniques are around 800-900. Nothing else has change in the last week or so. Only write two posts a week on this blog, and I don't use Digg or Social Bookmarking causing bursts of traffic.

Just all of a sudden more of my pages are higher in the SERPs. ONLY thing I've done differently is create Nofollow links and unlinked home page URLs in my comments on News Paper web site comments sections.

[hanse132]

it is very intersting

[martinibuster]

do unlinked URLs help if they are on HIGH ranked domains

Google is following JS links and adding that to their mix. I seem to recall, I think several years ago, that Google was already following unlinked URLs or at least could make sense of them and use them. If they can follow JS links and fold those into the index then it's probably easier to do the same to unlinked URLs.

[FranticFish]

There's indications of the increasing incorporation of 'citations' into the algorithm rather than just 'links'. A link is a citation, but possibly so is a brand mention, an unlinked url, your business postcode or address...

[jimbeetle]

Have you been keeping track of the blog's backlink profile? Though the original nofollow links don't pass juice they might be picked up by other folks and then propagate as dofollows.

[aristotle]

There is a theory that nofollow links from authoritave sites (like newspapers) can give your site greater "trust" in Google's eyes, amd that this can lead to improved rankings. So even though these nofollow links aren't "counted" for pagerank purposes, they might be counted for "trust".

Also, as FranticFish said, just the mentions of your site's URL could be counted as citations, and these could be factored into the algorithm in some way which improves rankings.

So these are two theories for how nofollow links and/or unlinked URLs could improve a site's Google rankings. But I don't know if either theory is correct.

[CainIV]

Worth setting up a controlled test for.

Certainly Frantic is correct - especially in the case of determining your position in the '7 pack' in Local Search.

[Nuttakorn]

You should put Google Analytics in place that will allow you analyze site traffic and source of back links accurately

[Robert Charlton]

There's indications of the increasing incorporation of 'citations' into the algorithm rather than just 'links'.

I'm seeing strong indications that co-occurrence data of some sort is at play, and that the co-occurrences are weighted, just as inbound links might be, by the source page quality, PageRank, trust, quantity, etc.

Certainly Frantic is correct - especially in the case of determining your position in the '7 pack' in Local Search.

I recently saw a 7 pack listing for an individual who happened to live in the right city and was a well-known commentator on a topic related to [cityname service], but not actually providing the cityname service that a searcher for the phrase would expect.

[Makaveli2007]

@FranticFish & Robert Charlton:

Do you basically mean that the SEs will pay increasingly more attention to social media mentions (right now especially tweets) as that's where the conversation on the www is moving?

and that this is already happening (them adjusting their algos to this trend)?

I know Im reading a bit between the lines, just wondering if this is what you guys mean.

[tangor]

"Good morning, Dave. Where shall we go today?"

"You pick it, after all, you know me better than myself."

"That is correct Dave. We will start with your Google Mail then Google Breakfast the Stock Market, then Google Break for Google Travel Planning (you are traveling this week, Dave), then..."

The deeper G and the other engines parse user activity the more fine=tuned the eventual idiot results will become... because all of us are NOT DAVE! :)

[Makaveli2007]

Hey dont you dare insult my buddy Dave!

LOL j/K

[FranticFish]

I can't give specifics, but this quote from Maile Ohye indicates the direction they're headed:

"There’s a way search is evolving, and when it comes to personalization we want to deliver results that are more and more unique. That’s where social search comes in for us – it’s expanding a theme we really want to pursue. For social search it comes from the social graph of the web layered on top of the link graph."

[Robert Charlton]

...the social graph of the web layered on top of the link graph.

Yes... Caffeine was described as having the capability to constantly refresh layers with different kinds of media. It does make sense that they'd want to keep social and the link graph layered and independently controllable, perhaps treating the results almost as another vertical or Universal channel.

Do you basically mean that the SEs will pay increasingly more attention to social media mentions (right now especially tweets) as that's where the conversation on the www is moving?

I see citations as still more associated with co-occurrence within regular body text than tweets would be.

When something like the HTML5 microdata specifications come into wide use, and perhaps even at this stage, then that's another type of content that can be isolated from the conventional body text layer. As I remember, phrase based indexing has provisions for extracting out structured markup of various kinds, so microdata can define yet another distinct set of signals.

Think of tweets, though, as separate entities with their own reputation system.

[Makaveli2007]

thanks for clarifying!