Re: On sources of traffic

From: Michael Martinez <Michael_at_xenite.org>
Date: Mon 09 Apr 2001 17:05:10 -0600

TOD FOLEY <info_at_whatyouget.com> WROTE:

>My Zeus Directory is located at
> http://whatyouget.com/links/themeindex.html

TO WHICH BARBARA SYBAL <email_at_gfxinc.com> REPLIED:

>This will probably seem like I'm picking on you,
>but it really is meant as a way for me to
>see if link popularity works.

>I've seen "link popularity" touted as the next
>be-all-and-end-all of the next generation of being
>found online,so your link site above was a good
>opportunity for me to see if there is any evidence
>of this.

I'll take a crack at this. As far as establishing
link popularity goes, I've done what I consider a very
good job without creating an affiliate program.
Depending on which service you select to test my
credibility, you should find anywhere from 2,000+
to 10,000+ links pointing to my domain or various parts
of it. "Officially" I claim to have in excess of 3,000
sites linking to mine.

I never set out to develop link popularity. By the
time I learned what it was and what it meant to have
link popularity, I already had it. It just came as a
consequence of building the kind of Web site that people
enjoy and want to link to. I'm not bragging. I'm just
trying to make it clear that, unlike most Webmasters, I
haven't had to struggle to build up link popularity.
So there are some issues where my opinions are probably
of less value than those of Webmasters who are really
having to scrounge for links.

That said, there are three major search services which
utilize link popularity: Google, Altavista, and Inktomi.
Their algorithms are carefully guarded secrets and anyone
who claims to have figured them out may know part of the
picture but probably doesn't know it all.

It is my belief that Google places the most emphasis on
link popularity, and Altavista places the least emphasis
on it. And they seem to use link popularity in different
ways. Google, for example, is looking for "quality" Web
sites. Their idea of a quality Web site seems to be one
which has a high reputation among other Web sites as
determined by inbound links (that is, link popularity).
Inktomi seems to be looking for "credible" sites. They
don't seem to use link popularity to judge quality so
much as to to determine that a site is something more
than just a doorway. Altavista seems to use link
popularity as a deciding factor. That is, if other
criteria are equal, link popularity may determine which
site gets listed first.

However, there are two other aspects of link popularity
which don't get discussed as often as the core idea.
The first aspect is link context, or link relevance.
Many people who study link popularity know about link
relevance, but it's not easy to work link relevance into
your optimization strategy. Essentially, link relevance
is determined by the words associated with a hyperlink,
usually the text which comes between the ">" and the
"</a" in the hyperlinks. These links are used to
establish what search terms (keywords and key phrases)
a given page is popular for.

Link credibility is is sort of a reverse application of
the process. That is, the engines seem to now be looking
at the links themselves and trying to figure out if they
are for real or just put on a page to boost someone else's
link popularity. The easiest way to establish that a
link has no credibility is to determine that it is part
of an automated reciprocal link page. The search engines
claim they simply ignore such pages. How do they
determine which pages are link farms? My guess is they
look for the required text or links that help promote the
link management services. That is the first thing I would
do if I were writing the filter for these types of pages.

But link credibility can be tested in other ways. For
example, many Webmasters create crawl pages which are mostly
intended to entice the spiders to deep-crawl sites. However,
if you host your crawl pages on another domain, do they
boost your link popularity? Some crawl pages are
intentionally text-lite. That is, they have little to no
text on them at all. This is because the Webmasters don't
want surfers to see the crawl pages. They just want to
ensure that the spiders see the links on the crawl
pages and follow them. I haven't found any indication
that any of the search engines dislike crawl pages.
But it's darned hard to find crawl pages in their indexes.
Hence, they have applied fairly simple criteria (in my
opinion) to filter out the crawl pages. That is, I am
sure they follow the links, but I don't believe the crawl
pages are helping with link popularity.

A credible link to your site will give your site a small
boost in link popularity. If that link happens to be
relevant to the content of your site, it will give your
site a greater boost in link popularity. If that link
happens to exist on a site that the search engines consider
to be important, it MAY give an even greater boost to your
site's link popularity (that is certainly the way Google
claims to do things).

The importance of link popularity, however, can be diluted
by other factors. For example, suppose you are targeting
search terms which have relatively little competition for
them? In that case, a well-defined title tag may be all
you need for a top ranking. Adding a few lines of
relevant text to your page helps with somewhat greater
compeition. Outbound links on your page which show that
you are linking to other relevant pages (either your own
or someone else's) add a further boost if there is even
more competition. And so on and so forth.

In short, the search engines, even Google, take other
factors into consideration, and chief among them is the
content on your own page. They don't want to list sites
first which are not relevant to the search term. They MAY
list a site which has an entry page (not a doorway/gateway
page, but a splash screen page). They understand that many
sites have splash screens, and I don't really see much
penalization for splash screens provided a site has a good
link popularity from credible sites. I usually recomend
against the use of splash screens for several reasons I
won't go into here, but they are not necessarily a bad
thing. Some sites use them well, and manage to offset the
adverse effects of relying upon splash screens.

I wouldn't panic if I didn't have link popularity for a
site. If it is well-developed, attractive, easy-to-navigate,
and offers information of use to people, then other Web sites
will eventually link to it. Even if it's just a business
site (and that is really the kind of site most people on
this list are interested in). Business sites can build their
link popularity, however, if they can develop affiliate
programs where the affiliate sites link back to them (hence,
using a service like Linkshare won't help you build your link popularity, unless they have changed their methodology since
I last checked it out).

Getting the site indexed should be a Webmaster's first
priority. Getting it optimized for high ranking on targeted
(and relevant) search terms should be the next priority.
Building link popularity should come third. Not because
link popularity isn't important, but rather because it's
easier to get people to link to good content that can already
be found in a search engine than to bare pages that aren't
being found anyway.

You can also work on getting directory listings (which aren't
affected by link popularity) that help promote awareness of
your site. This way, people will be able to link to you
while you are building link popularity on the search engines.


Michael Martinez
 Science Fiction and Fantasy info_at_xenite.org
  Visualizing Middle-earth, a book for all Tolkien fans
   http://www.xenite.org/



Received on Mon Apr 09 2001 - 18:05:10 CDT