Chapter 30
SEO: Inbound Links
How many inbound links do you have?
Chapter 27 introduced the three primary factors the search engines look for when ranking websites. Here they are again:
1. The quantity of unique relevant content.
2. The newness or freshness of that content.
3. The link structure surrounding the website.
The third factor is extremely important. Basically, Google considers an inbound link from a related content website to be a vote of confidence in your website. The more votes you have, the better your website is presumed to be. Now, there are a lot of inbound links that don't mean much. Untargeted web directories that do not present related content are a good example. “Link farms” are another. As a result, Google gives you credit for some links but not others.
Google also looks at a second level to see how many links are pointing to the websites that are linking to you. So, if I had an inbound link from a website that had five inbound links itself, it would count for less than a different inbound link coming from a website that had 100 inbound links. This methodology forms the foundation of the Google PageRank score. PageRank is a score Google calculates to reflect the relevance and importance of a website. The range is between 0 and 10, with 10 being the highest score. The Google PageRank score is calculated on an exponential curve so most websites have a score of 3 or lower. A PageRank of 4 is definitely above average. Predictably, Google has a PageRank of ...
