As we have talked about in previous chapters, Google does not simply look at the raw number
of links pointing at your website. They look at many other factors to try and assess the quality
of a link and how much value it should pass to the target page. In this chapter, we will take a
detailed look into what these factors could be and what this means to your work as a link
builder.
Some of these factors are mentioned in a patent filed by Google in 2004 and granted in 2010,
which became known as the “reasonable surfer” model. It basically outlines how various
elements of a link, as well as the page containing the link, may affect how Google treats a link.
Below we’ll take a look at these and explore how they may affect your work and what you need
to remember about each of them.
Number of other outgoing links on a page:
If the link pointing to your website is among hundreds or thousands of other outgoing links on
a single page, then chances are that it isn't as valuable. If you think about it from a user’s point
of view, they probably are not going to find a page with hundreds of links particularly useful.
There are, of course, exceptions, but, on the whole, these types of pages do not provide a
good user experience. There is also the probability that these types of pages are only created
for links and do not have much "real" content on them, which is also a signal of a page which
isn't a good user experience.
Also, going back to our knowledge of how PageRank works, the higher the number of outgoing
links on a page there are, the less value each of those links is worth. This isn’t a hard and fast
rule, though, and has been the topic of hot debate in the SEO industry for many years,
particularly in relation to a process called PageRank sculpting which we will explore later.
How this affects your work as an SEO
When seeking to get links from existing pages on a website, as opposed to new pages, take a
look at the number of other outgoing links on a page using a tool such as Search Status. If the
number looks very high, then you may want to consider whether the link is worth going for
and spending time acquiring. Obviously you should take account of other factors too, such as
whether the domain is a particularly strong one to get a link from, even if it is among
hundreds of other links.
You may also want to consider whether there is a genuine reason for a high number of other
links on the page. If there is a genuine reason, then the link may still be worth going for. One
thing you should definitely look out for is a lot of links to other websites which are not related
to the topic of your page. In particular, look for links which look like they go to gambling,
poker, pills, and health websites. If you see these, then you may be looking at a link exchange
page where the Webmaster has only put those links in place because he got one back from the
site being linked to. These are the type of reciprocal links that Google does not like to see and
will probably reduce the value of.
The page having a penalty or filter applied:
This is a bit of a controversial one. Traditionally, the official line from Google has always been
that links from bad pages can't hurt you. There have been a few comments from Google
employees to the contrary, but, on the whole, their stance has always been the same. That was
until very recently, when they actually reworded some of their Google Webmaster Guidelines
to imply that bad links could actually hurt you. My own personal experience (and that of many
SEOs) is that links from bad pages or penalized pages can hurt you.
I can see why Google, up until recently, held this public stance. They do not want to encourage
people to deliberately point bad links at their competitors in an effort to hurt their rankings.
The fact is that this is a practice which does happen a lot more than people think. Therefore, I
feel it is one that every SEO should be aware of and know how to deal with. We will get into a
lot more detail on identifying and removing link-based penalties later, but for now we will stick
within the context of this chapter.
How this affects your work as an SEO
You need to be able to identify links from pages which may be low quality in the eyes of
Google. You also need to be able to spot low quality pages when identifying possible link
targets. We will explore a method for identifying large numbers of low quality links in a link
profile later.