Category: Link Theory

This article utilizes metaphorical visualization techniques. Be careful not to confuse them with search engine algorithms. An Internal Link Profile is exactly what it sounds like. You have a page, John, that is linked to by Andy, Barney, and Charlie. T…

Although you have probably heard of “link profile analysis”, the phrase “link profile density” is relatively unique. I haven’t written anything about it for a very long time and the public Web lacks any formal definition for the concept. Here is how I define and use “link profile density”. The density of a Website’s backlink…

When you should disavow links to a site depends on which links you want to disavow and why you want to disavow them. They should be links placed in violation of search engine guidelines.   The urge to disavow links is strong for some SEO specialists. But some people feel enough doubt about the decision…

I was one of the first people to write about “toxic links” many years ago. I borrowed the phrase from a book on group dynamics. In 2008 I used the phrase “toxic links” in an article about the toxic people in the SEO industry who dominate online discussions by flooding them with comments. These people…

Link rot has become one of those old school phrase web marketers don’t discuss much any more. Nonetheless, it still occurs and creates havoc on search indexes that utilize linking relationships in their algorithms. But while marketers don’t say much about link rot any more, librarians and academics have a few things to say. A recent…

The post Should We Link to the Past? first appeared on SEO Theory.

Web marketers love to embrace and promote really bad ideas. It’s human nature to want to believe in magic. Do you need a miracle? Here is one all brightly packaged and ready to deliver to your home. Just send me $50. But wait! There’s more. If you act now, you’ll get a 20% discount plus…

Noise is the data you don’t want to analyze. On the Web — specifically in the link graph — noise is the data no one pays attention to. It is the trivial stuff ignored machine learning algorithms ignore. An example of trivial link noise would be two Websites, Mike and Charlie, who each link to…

Over the past two years I have published only four link theory articles, and of those three were direct responses to contemporary discussions in which I sought to debunk some wrong ideas coming from either the search engines or the…

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Over the past two years I have published only two link theory articles, and of those three were direct responses to contemporary discussions in which I sought to debunk some wrong ideas coming from either the search engines or the…

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Whether you are building links or auditing links you like most people are probably scanning popular Web marketing forums and blogs, or maybe even technology news Websites, for tips and tutorials on how to go about these activities. Even people…

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I published this article in the latest issue of the SEO Theory Premium Newsletter. Danny Sullivan sort of asked this question of Matt Cutts at SMX Advanced 2014 (Cf. this hour-long video). I have been contemplating this question for a…

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Everybody audits links, including me. Sometimes I do it just because someone asks me to do it. Sometimes I do it because I think there may be a problem in a backlink profile. I always browse a new client’s backlink…

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Setting up crawlers to probe other people’s Websites is unethical and unfriendly. Just because you want to know who is linking to your Website and where does not give you the right to waste other people’s bandwidth and server resources…

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A recent study explains why birds fly in a “V” formation: probably to save energy. Each bird in the formation takes advantage of the slight air currents its leading neighbor makes to increase soaring time and decrease flapping time. They…

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Had a request to write an article specifically about this topic: how to build high quality links with a “dofollow” relationship. Of course, “dofollow” is a figurative label we apply to any link that a search engine is likely to follow and allow to pass value. There remains, to this day, no “rel=’dofollow’” link attribute in the standards. I think that still has to be said because we are starting to mentally blot out the basic facts of link architecture. A link is just a reference to a document. It neither conveys sentiment nor measures quality. Larry Page and Sergey Brin originally tested their citation-analysis link strategy against a very small set of documents, found only on the Stanford University Website, which were anything but representative of the Web in general. Manipulative links already existed in volume before Page and Brin typed up their little white paper on PageRank. Paid links were already rampant on the Web. When Google stepped into the search space, it was easy fodder for link spammers and their SERPs made that plain and clear. Nonetheless, despite the many spankings that spammers handed to the Google engineers over the past 15 years, they have persisted with […]

It almost feels like the 1990s again. No one seems to know what to do with their Websites any more, or how to link out. If you’re living and working within the search engine optimization community you cannot fail to notice that Google has been closing the loopholes on linking schemes all year long. That wild, crazy link-sotted party that has been raging for ten years almost seems to be winding down. Whatever will Web marketers do now that they cannot spam Google’s index so easily any more? Well, let’s think about this, shall we? Link Out to Any Damn Website You Please I watch all of Matt Cutts’ videos. I have never once seen him say, “Google doesn’t want you to link to other Websites”. Quite the contrary, he says that Google encourages people to link out to each other. And nowhere did Matt or any other Googler I follow say you have to throw a “rel=’nofollow’” attribute on the outbound links you choose to give to other Websites. All they ask is that you use “rel=’nofollow’” for your marketing links. They don’t say “marketing links” but that’s really what they are talking about. So if you see a […]

I build link pages. I do this for myself, for clients, for friends, and occasionally for strangers upon whom I take a pity. A “link page” is no particular thing. It doesn’t necessarily look like THIS or like THAT. It’s a page that exists only for the purpose of linking out. Outbound links are important to the World Wide Web. It’s the links that make it the Web, obviously. I have — for many years now — advocated placing as many outbound links on Websites as possible. The SEO advantages of doing so have been plentiful, and not just because “parts of [Google’s] system encourage links to good sites”. Links Are Based Upon Naivete When I built my first Web directory I reviewed thousands of Websites that enthusiastic people submitted for inclusion. Back in those days we had no blogs, no content management systems, and everyone was pretty much ignorant of PHP, Perl, CSS, etc. The time it took people to put together even a 1-page Website might have been considerable, when you allow for the fact that they had to go through an extensive learning process (about basic HTML, Web editing tools, FTP, using an FTP tool, their service […]