Although most academic papers concerned with Web search focus on PageRank computations and spam filtering, a slowly growing body of literature does explore ideas in other areas. For example, A generic lexical URL segmentation framework for counting links, colinks or URLs (that is a .DOC file) looks at differents of counting links and relationships. The authors define four catagories of link relationships:
- Site to Site
- Site to Page
- Page to Site
- Page to Page
People in the search engine optimization industry might quickly expand the list to include:
- TLD to TLD
- ccTLD to ccTLD
- TLD to ccTLD
- ccTLD to TLD
The increasing emphasis that searchers, search engines, and Web marketers place on geolocation makes the source of the top-level domains significant.
And some people might suggest classifying links this way:
- Internal to internal
- Main domain to sub-domain
- Internal to external
I have furthered qualified links from time to time like this:
- Navigational (site-wide internal to internal)
- Secondary Navigational (sub-site internal to internal)
- Cross-promotional (internal to internal)
- Structural (internal to internal, as in a sitemap or internal directory)
- Promotional (internal to co-owned external)
- Affiliated (internal to external affiliated)
- Extra Promotional or Informational (internal to external non-affiliated)
A healthy Web site may participate in all these types of linking relationships or only a few of them. The type of relationship does not in any way determine the quality of the relationship. The type of relationship does, however, determine the depth or scope of document visibility.
Document visibility is the degree to which a document is exposed to potential readers. Documents have measurable (quantifiable) internal document visibility and external document visibility. You can measure these visibility factors in several ways: number of direct internal links, number of internal link pathways, number of direct external links, number of external link pathways, number of external site-to-document relationships, number of external page-to-document relationships, etc.
Strong document visibility would be measured across multiple top-level domains, country code top-level domains, site-to-page relationships, and similar indicators of broad recognition.
Weak document visibility would be indicated by very limited access to the document (usually only one or two internal links).
The Document Visibility Scale thus provides you with a sliding indicator (from Weak Document Visibility to Strong Document Visibility) that can be used as a more reliable metric than the Google Toolbar PageRank value. That is, when you’re measuring visibility you want to know how many documents point to your document or how many influencing documents point to documents that point to your document.
Including two-link relationships (short link pathways) in your visibility helps you understand how the Web works, but you have to qualify your link pathways. For example, if someone writes a blog post that says, “You’ll find great resources at this Yahoo! Directory page”, and the directory page contains 100 links of which 1 points to your document, you don’t have a two-link relationship.
A two-link relationship exists where the influencer document points to a secondary document that ONLY refers to your destination. There is a clear and tightly focused pathway from document A through document B to document C. A surfer just clicking on links is not going to diverge by clicking on a link that leads elsewhere.
These High Value Link Pathways are rare but they are not necessarily hard to arrange (and they are extremely easy to manufacture). Let’s say you can get Michael’s Blog to write a post about Michael’s White Paper. Michael’s White Paper in turn mentions Michael’s Handy Dandy Web Tool Device.
That is a 2-link relationship (a High Value Link Pathway). This 2-link relationship increases the document visibility for Michael’s Handy Dandy Web Tool Device.
So where can you go with this on a practical level? First, if you look at your known link profile (all the links that you have documented for your Web site), you can classify your links according to any or all of the criteria above. If you’re an aggressive link builder and you see you’re lacking some of those defined link relationships, it may (or may not) behoove you to round out your linking relationships.
Understand that there is no intrinsic search value in obtaining more links from more resources. Once you have achieved optimum link value simply adding to it is a waste of time. But if you are constantly building out the content on your Web site then obtaining new links can be worthwhile as long as you don’t saturate yourself repeatedly.
Pacing your link acquisitions gives you time to think about how to leverage your link building into a full-scale marketing campaign. Links comprise only a small part of search engine optimization and most of your SEO efforts should be focused on things that have higher returns on investment.
But links can do things for a Web site that search engines cannot. When you free yourself from the misunderstanding that you need links for SEO you will be more comfortable with building functional linking relationships that promote your Web site.
Javascript and NoFollow links can still send you traffic.
Javascript and NoFollow links can still increase your visibility.
However, links placed on scrolling content have limited value. That is, blog comment links and forum footer links only help as long as people are looking at your comments and posts. When that traffic dies off your comment links and forum footer links no longer have any value. Unless you keep people looking at those posts, you’re time invested in creating them was pretty much wasted.
If you are a regular forum member and post something every day, you create a type of visibility that extends beyond the link. If you run a linkbot that just drops 3 or 4 posts in a forum, you create very little visibility. No one has any idea of who your linkbot persona is, they don’t value its contributions, and its links are not likely to generate much traffic (nor are they very likely to be given much credibility by search engines, assuming search engines even see the links).
Sustained visibility is the best type of visibility for any link. This may be obtained through sponsorships, partnerships, advertising purchases, or brand imprinting through the distribution of widgets and affiliate code (to mention a few examples). Of course, it’s easy to get into trouble with widgets and affiliate code branding (both of which are very old, spammed out ideas and only an amateur would consider using them as a primary means of obtaining links these days).
Links with sustained visibility should be constructed to create and support brand identity and value. If they are wasted on anchor text you sacrifice potential market leadership for potential search engine results improvement (which is not easy to maintain in a competitive query). When people equate the brand with the product or the service, you don’t need to compete for queries.
So the last set of link classifications looks like this:
- Brand identity (associating a brand with an individual or company)
- Brand support (associating a brand with a product or service)
- Advertising
- PageRank
- Anchor Text
- Crawling
- Hostile
Hostile links take on several forms and I am not simply referring to so-called Google bowling. If you watched the hostile campaigns several SEOs conducted against Ted Leonsis, Dave Pasternack, Jason Calacanis, and others last year, you saw some examples of hostile linking. The infamous “miserable failure” linking campaigns provide other examples of hostile linking.
Brand Identity and Brand Support links are the most important and valuable links to have. They have the most impact on document visibility and ultimately on your Internet marketing success. Brand-related links tend to be less transient, more trustworthy, and more consumer-oriented. Advertising links may be brand-related but most often they are product or service related. The difference lies in where the ad text places its emphasis: on the brand or on the product/service.
SEOs focus on PageRank and Anchor Text links. Good SEOs also place value on crawling links. But the best SEOs get the most bang for their buck and they don’t obsess over PageRank and Anchor Text.
Given a choice between a Brand link and a PageRank/Anchor Text link, you should ALWAYS go for the Brand link. As long as it creates visibility it will help with your search engine optimization down the line. Call that trickle-down SEO.
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