27th December 2007

Links are content

posted in Google |

I’ve always subscribed to the theory that links are part of the content.  In other words a page gets also judged on the quality and topic of the pages it links to.  It follows from the academic realm where Google was born, a paper with no references isn’t going to be taken seriously, and neither should a web page.  Obviously linking to the #1 result for the term you are targeting is also going to help them, but the trick has always been to link out to highly authoritative sites for terms that surround the keyword targeting.

Anyway, I may be right and I may be wrong, assuming I am right for a brief moment, would a rel=”nofollow” link still count as content to help you rank?

As anecdotal evidence we could use the wikipedia which isn’t an authority on any subject but does use copious amounts of nofollow links to actual authorities, and usually outranks them.

Thoughts, anyone? Bueller, Bueller? Is this thing on?

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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 27th, 2007 at 12:10 pm and is filed under Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. All comments are subject to my NoFollow policy. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

There are currently 4 responses to “Links are content”

Why not let me know what you think by adding your own comment! All the cool kids are doing it.

  1. 1 MyAvatars 0.2 On December 27th, 2007, Richard Hearne said:

    My €0.02 - don’t go for it personally. Outbound links can hurt, but would be far too noisy a signal for any sort of positive ranking. I think Wiki has a ’special’ rapport with Google - but undoubtedly the sheer volume of in bound links and the retention of all pagerank within the site is playing a major role also.

  2. 2 MyAvatars 0.2 On December 28th, 2007, Forrest said:

    Interesting to see someone remember back to Google’s humble academic birth. Unfortunately, it seems like without a job there, anecdotal evidence is all we have to go on.

    I like the theory, though. I wrote an article on black and white photography a while ago, and naturally linked out to Ansel Adams and other masters. And to lesser known artists, like the great Sebastiao Salgado. I’ve always thought that if you manage to get your audience’s attention, it makes sense to point to where they can find more information. And that by introducing people to other good resources, you at least stand a chance of getting on their good side, making them more likely for a return visit.

  3. 3 MyAvatars 0.2 On December 29th, 2007, dockarl said:

    I’m up in the air on that question.

    I certainly notice that position for more competitive keywords / phrases tends to improve when I link out to relevant sites within my post. It would make sense - the quality of a paper is often measured by the quality of references it makes, not just how many times it is referenced.

    I guess if you link out to lots of relevant sites you start to look like a bit more of a ‘knowledge center’ to Google.

    Also, the naturallness factor - if you hoard all your pagerank by not linking out, it becomes obvious to the gbot.

    M

  4. 4 MyAvatars 0.2 On December 31st, 2007, Forrest said:

    Now this brings up another question … one that probably can’t be answered by someone that doesn’t have a recent check stub from Google. Do they really care about quality, or only how well a match a given page is to a particular search phrase? Because … thinking of Google as an evaluator of research papers might blind us to the ways Google is not like an evaluator of research papers.

    I’m just curious on whether anyone has tried their hand at researching this?

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