SEO Free Recommendations

• Popularity of Site in Relevant Communities The Google Adsense SEO – In the example above, the weight or power of a site’s vote is based on its raw popularity across the web. As search engines became more sophisticated and granular in their approach to link data, they acknowledged the existence of “topical communities”; sites on the same subject that often interlink with one another, referencing documents and providing unique data on a particular topic. Sites in these communities provide more value when they link to a site/page on a relevant subject rather than a site that is largely irrelevant to their topic.

• Text Directly Surrounding the Link – Search engines have been noted to weight the text directly surrounding a link with greater important and relevant than the other text on the page. Thus, a link from inside an on-topic paragraph may carry greater weight than a link in the sidebar or footer.

Subject Matter of the Linking Page The Google Adsense SEO Guide
The topical relationship between the subject of a given page and the sites/pages linked to on it may also factor into the value a search engine assigns to that link. Thus, it will be more valuable to have links from pages that are related to the site/pages subject matter than those that have little to do with the topic.

These are only a few of the many factors search engines measure and weight when evaluating links. For a more complete list, see SEOmoz’s search engine ranking factors article.

Link metrics are in place so that search engines can find information to trust. In the academic world greater citation meant greater importance, but in a commercial environment, manipulation and conflicting interests interfere with the purity of citation-based measurements. Thus, on the modern WWW, the source, style and context of those citations is vital to ensuring high quality results.

The Anatomy of a HyperLink
A standard hyperlink in HTML code looks like this:
SEOmoz

SEOmoz
In this example, the code simply indicates that the text “SEOmoz” (called the “anchor text” of the link) should be hyperlinked to the page http://www.seomoz.org. A search engine would interpret this code as a message that the page carrying this code believed the page http://www.seomoz.org to be relevant to the text on the page and particularly relevant to the term “SEOmoz”.

A more complex piece of HTML code for a link may include additional attributes such as:
SEOmoz

SEOmoz
In this example, new elements such as the link title and rel attribute may influence how a search engine views the link, despite it’s appearance on the page remaining unchanged. The title attribute may serve as an additional piece of information, telling the search engine that http://www.seomoz.org, in addition to being related to the term “SEOmoz”, is also relevant to the phrase “Rand’s Site”. The rel attribute, originally designed to describe the relationship between the linked-to page and the linking page, has, with the recent emergence of the “nofollow” descriptive, become more complex.

“Nofollow” is a tag designed specifically for search engines. When ascribed to a link in the rel attribute, it tells the engine’s ranking system that the link should not be considered an editorially approved “vote” for the linked-to page. Currently, 3 major search engines (Yahoo!, MSN & Google) all support “nofollow”. AskJeeves, due to its unique ranking system, does not support nofollow, and ignores its presence in link code. For more information about how this works, visit Danny Sullivan’s description of nofollow’s inception on the SEW blog.

Some links may be assigned to images, rather than text:

This example shows an image named “rand.jpg” linking to the page – http://www.seomoz.org/randfish.php. The alt attribute, designed originally to display in place of images that were slow to load or on voice-based browsers for the blind, reads “Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz” (in many browsers, you can see the alt text by hovering the mouse over the images). Search engines can use the information in an image based link, including the name of the image and the alt attribute to interpret what the linked-to page is about.

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