To Those Who Link Go The Spoils
Google ranks your site based on who you link to, and who’s linking to you. They’ve spent years filtering out gratuitous links, and so now it takes a bit of work to make good, Google-quality links. Believe it or not, that’s good for you and your site.
On the web, searching means Google, Yahoo!, and maybe your ISP service, like AOL’s or MSN’s search. But since the Google and Yahoo! technology power most of these search sites, you’re looking at 95% of web search results getting served by one of these two giants.
Yahoo! bought it's half of the pie by gobbling up Inktomi, Overture, and AllTheWeb—and since Yahoo! delivers primary results to those who pay for it, you'll need plenty of money to buy into their slice of pie. But Google got its pie largely on word of mouth. Google provides just about all of the non-paid placement search results for a reason—they give results you’re likely to want. How is that?
First, they do what all search engines do: they send out “spiders” to crawl the web and see what’s there. Then Google’s PageRank software examines the links contained in those pages. It treats those links like votes:
- Your link to a popular site on the same topic is useful to web surfers; that gets a vote.
- A link to your page from another site is like a stamp of approval; that gets a vote.
- Now the crazy part: the more votes you get, the more popular you are, and the more popular you are, the more your votes count.
See how this linking business feeds back on itself? It’s called a “topical community,” with each site in the community voting for the most useful site in the community. Then, when Google displays the search results, it ranks all those millions of pages both by how close they match the search terms, and also by how many community votes they received.
It’s the Linking, Stupid
When webmasters first understood how this worked, they rapidly went out and created the popular “Bob’s Favorites,” or the incredibly unuseful pages of “Links to Sites That Link To Me.” Soon, an entire industry sprung up where unscrupulous people with a thousand sites would sell “crosslinking services” to the unwary. Google’s effectiveness dropped because in everyone’s attempt to be listed first, they were getting listed even when they weren’t helpful to the searcher.
Google did something smart: they started looking at the pages the way a person does. What does this page talk about, and does that page that it’s linking to talk about the same thing?
Don’t get me wrong. Google didn’t just go and invent artificial intelligence. But they did figure that if a bunch of words occur near each other here, and the same bunch of words occur over there but in a different order, then the same topic is being discussed both here and there. And if a link happens to go from here to there, or from there to here, then that’s a good link. That’s a vote.
And votes are powerful stuff. Search Google for the word “Coke” and you’ll see that net-votes are worth more than money. As of this writing, the first seven results (out of 2.3 million) are what you’d expect: variations on that multi-gazillion dollar corporation, Coca-Cola. But number eight is just some guy who links to internet-enabled Coke machines. He links out, people in the “Coke community” link to him, usually using the same words and always the same topic, and there you go. Joe Freesite is rubbing noses with Mr. Moneybags.
ADDENDUM:I’m fairly certain it has nothing to do with him being a recent hire at Google...
To Do
Now that you know the gist of how Google works, how can you use this knowledge to benefit your website’s ranking? Here are some simple tips:
Link within.
A page with a list of links is nearly useless and is mostly ignored by Googlebot. Link within the text that is talking about the subject of the link, and not the “click here” or “this page.” What you really want is for the linked text to describe the page that you’re linking to.
Link out.
Make sure to link to other sites’ pages that discuss the topics you are discussing. Your links should be useful to your audience in order to strengthen your part in your topical community. Many site owners fret about “sending people away,” but people remember how they got to places and if your site is their starting point for good links, then you get the most visits.
Link up.
Link to similar pages in sites that are more popular than yours. 
You may need to do a little research into your search keyword scheme to really have this pan out. You are looking for sites that turn up higher in the ranking in the same searches your site shows up in.
Link well.
Use the title attribute in your links to provide additional context; in most browsers, the text in the title attribute will pop up when the user hovers their pointer over the link. Don’t use the target attribute or Javascript to cause the link to open in a new window; this degrades the power of this link’s connection to a spider’s eyes.
Link back.
Whenever you can, help people link to you on your terms: your specific terms in the linked text, image alt text, and title text. Provide a button, HTML they can cut and paste, and a variety of options to fit their site; incorporate your target keywords. Put a link-back agreement in your contracts with clients, and make sure to state how the link should appear in the site. Even when your client or customer doesn’t have a website of their own that they can link to you from, give them the HTML complete with text and title; they may issue a press release (“Local Company Does Swell”—you’d be surprised), and overnight your link is published in a thousand articles.
Link right.
Links to a large number of sites is more detrimental than no links at all if those sites are not topically related to your keywords. It brands you as a spammer to spiders. Is the link useful to a user reading this page? Then it’s a good link. Otherwise, it can take away from your relevancy score.
Just tightening your links won’t replace a full-fledged search engine optimization plan, but doing all that linking sure will help Google take notice of your site. Make it a habit—don’t just say “linking is this month’s job” and then put it aside next month. Keep it going. Because there’s something else all this linking does.
It makes your users take notice, too. And that’s a good thing for any site.
