Off Page Optimization
The necessity for off page optimization was born from the simple fact that trying to rank millions of similar pages based on the content of the pages alone is a very difficult concept as there are likely many pages which cover a topic well and will also be very similar in content.
Google from the very beginning adopted the practice of using external anchor text to indicate what seemed like important pages on a particular topic. In the words of the Google founders:
"The text of links is treated in a special way in our search engine. Most search engines associate the text of a link with the page that the link is on. In addition, we associate it with the page the link points to. This has several advantages. First, anchors often provide more accurate descriptions of web pages than the pages themselves. Second, anchors may exist for documents which cannot be indexed by a text-based search engine, such as images, programs, and databases.."
Simple put Google (and the many other search engines who have followed their lead), consider that if an external web page links to another page with a particular anchor text that is a very good indication of what that page is about and in addition counts as a sort of vote of confidence for that topic on that page.
Like any other practice which webmasters have found will assist their pages in ranking well, this has been adopted wholesale as a ranking tool and has led to many abuses of an otherwise very good tool.
These abuses have included setting up hundreds of sites with thousands of pages in order to interlink between the sites, to setting up sites which exist only to provide links for all comers, and more.
There is a great deal of discussion and misunderstanding regarding links with opinions ranging from don't waste your time content is king, to those who try to pass themselves off as so-called experts and will tell you that it is a terribly complicated issue with the PR of the page, the relevancy of the link text, the links pointing at the page that links to you the content of the page that links to you and much more.
Sometimes called link popularity, sometimes simply called linking, this is a topic which every webmaster should understand and use correctly. In the following pages we will discuss the topic of linking in more detail according to the type of links and try to explain what our experience has taught us works.
Back to the navigation page |
 Reciprocal links |
