How-To
Link Reputation and Your Website
Understanding its benefits to search engine optimization by Michael Marshall
Jan 07, 2004
Definition of link reputation
Understanding Link Reputation is extremely important for any webmaster or others concerned with search engine ranking. It involves the relationship backlinks (links pointing back to you) have to a target web page and the context of those backlinks. This relationship and context can be measured with respect to a particular search query or theme and has the consequence of revealing how highly a backlink speaks about your web page with regard to that theme. If link popularity is how many pages talk about you, link reputation is how well backlinks talk about you - quality vs. quantity.
Search engines evaluate link reputation differently putting varying weight on different factors:
- Inbound and outbound link relationships
- Whether a page is considered an expert page for the theme
- Page rank
- Whether pages are affiliated to each other (based on IP address and/or domain name
- Whether a page appears in a directory listing, like DMOZ.
Importance of link reputation
AltaVista, AOL, Google, HotBot, Inktomi, MSN, Teoma and Yahoo! all use link reputation as a major factor in ranking web pages. What backlinks say about a target page and how well they say it can increase or decrease the relevancy of that page to a specific search query or theme in the eyes of a search engine. Therefore, it has a direct influence on your ranking and, consequently, on the amount of traffic to that target page.
Context of a backlink
The context of a backlink is very important and includes, but may not be limited to, the link text between the open and close anchor tags of the backlink, title text of the backlink page, and instances of header text on the backlink page.
link text - <a href=". . .">LINK TEXT</a>
title text - <title>TITLE TEXT</title>
header text - <h1>HEADER TEXT</h1>
These important context elements are said to qualify the links on a page and are often called keyphrases - not to be confused with this term's standard SEO industry use as a phrase which forms (part of) a search engine query. To avoid this confusion, I will refer to this non-standard use as reputation keyphrase. They determine the semantic, or thematic, sphere of influence of the backlinks they govern. Title text governs all links on a page. Header text governs all links until the next heading of the same or greater importance. Link text only governs the URL with which it is associated.
Consider the following snippet of HTML pseudo-code with three links and accompanying context, reputation keyphrases, marked as RKP:
<title>Title of the page</title> - RKP1
<h1>Header 1<h1> - RKP2
.
blah blah blah <a href="URL1">Link Text1</a> blah blah blah
(Where "URL1" Link Text1 marks RKP3)
<h2>Header 2<h2> - RKP4
.
blah blah blah <a href="URL2">Link Text2</a> blah blah blah
(Where "URL2" Link Text2 marks RKP5)
<h1>Header 3<h1> - RKP6
.
blah blah blah <a href="URL3">Link Text3</a> blah blah blah
(Where "URL3" Link Text3 marks RKP7)
In the above example, the following qualification relationships hold:
- RKP1 qualifies URL1, URL2 and URL3
- RKP2 qualifies URL1 and URL2
- RKP3 qualifies URL1
- RKP4 qualifies URL2
- RKP5 qualifies URL2
- RKP6 qualifies URL3
- RKP7 qualifies URL3
The strength of reputation keyphrases is also considered. The typical factors considered are the density of the SEO keyphrase within a reputation keyphrase, offset of the SEO keyphrase within a reputation keyphrase, and how many terms within the SEO keyphrase appear in a reputation keyphrase. Furthermore, when calculating the context of backlinks, title text is weighted more heavily than header text which is weighted more heavily than link text.
Link reputation: a tool to measure it
Understanding this will help you utilize the power of backlinks more effectively. I have recently developed a free tool anyone can use that will help you determine the power of backlinks to your own web pages. Think of it as my personal Christmas gift to Webmasters and SEO specialists worldwide. It gives a concrete measurement or score that takes into account the backlink context factors mentioned above. Of course, there are many different was to measure reputation. The calculations used by this tool are based on the much-discussed HillTop Algorithm. Just a cursory glance at the research paper shows that quite a bit of math and statistics would be involved in measuring this by hand. My tool will do it all for you. My intention at present is for the use of this tool to remain free indefinitely and to add new features occasionally.
Visit the following page to try this Free Link Reputation Measurement Tool.