What Gives A Link Its Ranking Power

June 28th, 2008

Where Does The Link Magic Come From With Page Rank?

I am sitting on the train on the way home from downtown Chicago and was thinking about a site I recently analyzed for a client and started writing my thoughts.

With the introduction of the page rank factor within Google a few years back, the increased trend of link building from high page rank sites is on the rise. The green page rank bar represents a number based on the total links you have and the strength (page rank) of the pages that those links come from, but a high page rank does not always translate to being ranked well for key search terms. The majority of the search engine ranking factors lie outside this page rank number and are focused on how the inbound links are engineered.

Let’s take for example “xyz.com” this site may have 1000 links pointing to it, most located on sites with a page rank of 6 or better. Now, this simple fact based off the page rank algorithm might give site “xyz” a page rank of 6. But why is this site not ranking for its key terms? If we take a closer look at these inbound links, what we see is most of the links pointing back to the site are either the url linked back, or have anchor text of “read more”.

Like many sites I see the fact that this site has an above average page rank is only a representation of the page rank formula at its simplest, and does not mean that the site will get ranked well for its keywords.

If the length of that little green bar does not hold all the link magic for ranking well, where does the magic lie?
Two words, “Anchor Text”. The anchor text of the link holds a big portion of the actual ranking factor for the link. In the example above the anchor text was either the URL or “read more”, which unless you are trying to get ranked for your URL (which if your not ranked 1st already for xyz.com than your site has other technical issues that need to be fixed first) or get ranked for ‘read more” (which would be extremely difficult and I don’t know what the keywords “read more” would be beneficial to anyone, those inbound links you worked hard to get do very little except make that little green bar get bigger.

The Best Solution For A Linking Campaign
The best solution would be to combine the two strategies of getting links on high page rank sites, those which have relevant content to your vertical, and focus on quality of unique and keyword dense anchor text and not the total number of links you will get. It is better to have 10 links that all have unique anchor text based off your keyword set and that are focused on pages that are relevant to the pages they will link to, than having 50 links on relevant sites all having the same anchor text. (Those numbers might be small but you get the picture) If you want to get more in depth please go to this basic link engineering information.

Good anchor text placement
Contextual links in my opinion hold the most SEO benefit and drive the most traffic to your site.

Why are Contextual links better?

These links can’t usually be bought, which is good when Google is cracking down on paid links.
They are usually within an article that is contextually about what you’re linking to.
The anchor text can be focused on a specific keyword.
These links reside outside the boiler plate of the site so they have more value with SEO.

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