Jonathan Leger gave the autorisation to republish one of his articles that is a trememdous must read. You can also download his  free pdf on  3 way linking or read more about his top notch product Linking strategy .

August 20, 2007

How Links Power Search Results

I’ve been talking a lot lately about the power of links when influencing Google’s search results. In particular, I’ve been showing how Google ranks pages based on the keywords found in the link text that are aimed directly at those pages.

However, getting links to your site helps your ranking for more than just the individual page that the links are aimed at. Getting links to your home page, for example, for a certain set of keywords will also help your site’s inner pages rank for what are called “long tail” keywords. I’ll get into what those are shortly.

To illustrate: let’s say you have a content site about Home-Made Widgets. Big widgets, small widgets, green widgets, blue widgets — if it relates to widgets, you’ve got an article about it on your site.

However, what if most of the links for your Home-Made Widgets site are aimed at your home page, and most of the anchor texts of those links relates to Home-Made Widgets in general, not the more specific varieties of home-made widgets? Would you expect your site’s inner pages to receive traffic because of the links you have pointed at your home page?

The first answer that comes to your mind might be “No.” Since all of your links are aimed at your home page, they are only helping the ranking of your home page.. right?

Wrong.

Having home-page links related to the general subject of your site will also help your inner pages rank for what have come to be known as “long tail keywords.” A “long tail keyword” is just a super-targeted set of keywords that usually contains quite a few terms. For example, “Home-Made Widgets” is not a long tail keyword, but “Small Home-Made Widgets in Dallas Texas” is.

In my experience with Google, I’ve found Google to basically work like this:

1. A user types in a search term (say, “Small Home-Made Widgets in Dallas Texas”).
2. Google scans its index to find all of the pages whose actual text is related to the search query, and those pages are arranged according to how closely they are related to the query.
3. Google then checks to see if any of those pages have links to them that contain the search query. The list of results is then rearranged, with the pages with the most relevant links being first.
4. Now Google checks to see if any of the sites that the related pages are found on are an “authority” on the subject at hand. This authority is based on the number and quality of links aimed at the site as a whole, and not just the specific page. The results are then rearranged again with this “authority” mixed into the rankings. It’s this last set of results that is actually displayed to the user.

Now, that’s a simplified view of what I perceive to be going on underneath Google’s hood, and the order of the operations may not be just right, but from my experience and study of the search engine it appears to be a pretty accurate assessment.

Just because a page doesn’t have links aimed directly at it does not mean that the page will not rank well for a given set of keywords. If your site is perceived by Google as having enough “authority” on the subject in general, the page may even outrank pages that do have direct links to them.

Since very few people are actually optimizing pages for the billions of possible long tail keywords (“Small Home-Made Widgets in Dallas Texas”, for example), Google often reverts to the authority of the sites as a whole to see what should be ranked first.

Let me give a good example of this happening.

Here’s a screenshot of the top results Google is currently showing for the phrase “article marketing for long tail keywords”:

The #1 ranking result is from doshdosh.com, and the #2 result is from searchengineguide.com. This set of rankings is defying a couple of generally accepted (false) notions about how Google ranks sites.

First of all, the doshdosh.com result page has no PageRank (the doshdosh.com homepage is a PR4), and the searchengineguide.com result has a PR4 (the searchengineguide.com homepage is a PR7). So all of searchengineguide.com’s PageRank isn’t doing it one lick of good, despite the pervasive myth that PageRank matters (which it doesn’t).

Digging deeper into the linking of the two results makes things even more confusing if you don’t understand how Google views a site’s “authority”. The doshdosh.com result, according to Yahoo!, has only 50 in-bound links from sites other than itself, whereas the searchengineguide.com result has 131.

Now, it’s hard to believe that anybody would be linking to either of these pages with keywords that aren’t at least somewhat related to the page content most of the time, given the extremely targeted focus of both articles. I checked both pages’ backlinks using SEO Elite (an outstanding SEO tool), and sure enough, the link texts pointed at both sites very often contain the phrase “long tail” and the words “keyword” or “keywords”. So the few links both sites have are targeted about the same.

It might seem odd that the page with far more links is being out-ranked by a “lesser” page, but it starts to make more sense once we look at the total volume of links that both sites have. You see, even though the doshdosh.com site has only 50 links to the specific results page, the site as a whole has 181,223 links. Compare that to the searchengineguide.com site, which has 168,144 links: more than 13,000 fewer links than doshdosh.com.

In terms of percentages, it may not seem like much (13,000 links is 7% of 168,144), but that’s just enough extra “authority” for Google’s algorithm to decide that the doshdosh.com page should rank #1 for the phrase instead of searchengineguide.com’s page: even though the page itself has fewer links.

It’s this kind of Google “authority” measurement that causes sites like Wikipedia to rank for a huge array of diverse keywords, even though the Wikipedia entry itself may not be heavily linked. Google rates the site as a whole based on its total volume and quality of links, and (currently anyway) its algorithm is deciding that this “authority” makes its entries worthy of out-ranking other sites whose individual result pages may have more links than the Wikipedia article. And how many links does the Wikipedia.org site have? According to Yahoo!, 75,226,779. Now that’s a lot of authority!

The bottom line is that you want to get links to your inner pages, but don’t forget to make sure your whole site is well linked also. And be sure to include a variety of related keywords in your articles and site content even though you’re not getting links for those specific long tail keywords. Google will often rank your pages for these long tail keywords based only on the “authority” it has assigned to your site.

Hundreds of webmasters are seeing incredible results using 3WayLinks.net to get their sites well-linked in Google’s eyes (myself included). I certainly recommend you get yourself an account with 3WL if you’re wanting to rank your sites well in Google.

Once Again Thanks Jon for this must read. David Norden