• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 738 0

from another website. The best way to explain this is to use an offline situation. If I were to ask for a friend’s recommendation on where to eat, they would probably give me the name of a restaurant that they enjoy. If I go to eat at that restaurant, who benefits from that exchange? Financially, the restaurant benefits. If I have a good meal, then both the restaurant and my friend benefit from an increased reputation. My only benefit is that I had a great meal. Linking follows the same path. A true link referral is where the site that is the destination of the link benefits from the searcher who needs an answer. The site benefits from the incoming visitors and possible business. The website that linked to that destination grows in the searcher’s mind as a trusted resource. This is the perfect world that search engines envision when calculating links as a source of website authority.

Reciprocal linking implies that there is a kickback on the referral. As soon as we find out that our friend recommended the restaurant because he gets financial compensation for his referrals, his advice is now suspect. Did he recommend the restaurant out of our best interest or his? This is why reciprocal links simply do not count as highly, because it shows there may be an established relationship involved.

The Source of the Link

Beyond what is in your control on your website, the search engines place a significant amount of importance on the content of other websites that link to your website. Those other websites are third-party, ideally not related to your company but are recommending it in some manner, which provides the search engines with an independent view of your website.

Site Content

Search engines evaluate a number of factors in the source and destinations of the link. On the page that contains the link, the search engines factor the surrounding content around the link, the content of the entire page, and the relevance of the linking site. The search engines are attempting to assess the relevancy of the link in accordance with the overall content of the website. In short, does the content of the link reflect the content of the website?

Search engines may use the following questions in determining a link’s value:

Is the linked page relevant to the linking page?

Are the two sites relevant?

What is the content of the overall linked website?

Obviously, if you have a website about vintage car restoration, it follows that many of your links will follow along with the content of the site, with links to parts suppliers, links to articles or “how-to” videos, and links to pictures of other people’s cars. If, on this vintage car website, you have a link to your friend’s wedding cake website, it probably won’t carry much weight. Your website has shown content and authority concerning one subject, yet the link is far outside the contextual spectrum of cars. The two subjects do not match well, so although the link will pass some measure of popularity, it most likely won’t pass as much as when you link to another auto-oriented destination.

Regional Content

This is a ranking factor that has been added in the past year or so in the search results. Sites that gain a number of links within a region will rank well within that region. This is especially evident in country-based websites where links gained from within that country make a website much more relevant than a foreign website with few native links. This is another level of measuring relevance based on regional content, country-specific content, and language-based searches.

Applying regional weighting now makes it possible for a search query made in France, using French language, to direct a searcher to the French version of an international company website. It is something that most people take for granted, so it may not sound impressive. However, years ago, this was not as smooth a process as it is today. The search engines are getting better at this process and saving international companies many headaches in developing workarounds to accommodate any fault in the progression.