May
When Google did some 40 tweaks in its system last February, one of the updates that caught the attention of the SEO community concerns the search engine’s link evaluation method. According to Google, it turned off one of its long-time link analysis methods in order to keep its system more functional, clean and easy to understand.
The sad part is that the search engine giant did not specifically pointed out which of its past link evaluation methods had retired, making numerous webmasters feel uneasy. Speculations about the change have been going around – some said that the update may have occurred in local interconnectivity; others suggest that it might be the indexing of anchor text or, perhaps, the cross-language retrieval.
Whatever link evaluation method Google has killed, one particular thing is for sure: It relies on some “characteristics or signals of links” in order to evaluate the topic of a linked page. So, what could these signals or characteristic be? Below are some suggestions.
Anchor text. The links found within content have long been a factor in identifying the possible meaning of a linked page from the overall theme of the page that links to it. Thus, if numerous sites are linking to a page using the anchor text “weddings,” it is likely that the page is going to get higher rankings for the term “weddings.”
Content and surrounding texts. These signals help establish the possible context found in a link, which in turn defines what the linked page is all about. Suppose you are selling dresses on your website, it is likely that you will rank higher on the result page if the content and surrounding texts where the link to your website is found is about dresses.
Link positioning. The position of a link is also said to be another vital signal. A link found in the footer is regarded to be less significant compared to the link found within the body of a page. Navigational links said to be depreciated to a certain degree, though not as much regular non-depreciated link.
HTML signals related to link value. Factors such as bold, italics, heading tags, capitalization, etc. are said to assign more value to a link.
Website age. Links that have been around for a long time appear to have better chances of being indexed by Google as opposed to those links that come and go. This is because it is believed that the more established the link is, the more likely will Google trust it.
Any of these characteristics or signals may have been removed or changed by Google. The thing is, no one will know for sure unless Google announces it itself. Webmasters and SEO professionals can only hope that the update will not be damaging to their efforts to increase the rankings of pages.
Robert Kirk is an SEO and the Managing Director of RFK Solutions Ltd, an SEO Company in Scotland who carry out range of SEO services and website design.
