16. Link Reputation

In the last chapter we looked at Google’s Page Rank (PR). Now, we are ready for something that goes hand-in-hand with PR to help your rankings – Link Reputation.

A good PR can help a web page rank well, not because it has a high PR, but because of how it achieved that high PR.

Read that sentence again. It explains in one sentence how PR and link reputation work together.

e.g. http://infertility.about.com/ has a PR7.

It is obviously an important page in the eyes of Google. I just did a Google search and found it at #3 for “infertility”. Not bad for a keyword with 12 million + competing pages.

What makes this page important in the field of Infertility?

Is it the high Page Rank?

No, and yes…

The page is important because it has a high PR, but the reason it is important in the niche of Infertility, and not something else, is because a combination of on-page text, and the links pointing to this page. The links pointing to a page, tell the search engines what the page is about.

As we saw before, links contain "link text". This is the text that is underlined on the web page. The search engines assume that if the link says "blue widgets", then the page it links to is about "blue widgets". If 10 pages point to the same page using the link text "blue widgets", then the reputation for that page builds. As this reputation builds, so does the potential to rank well. If 100 pages point to the page using "blue widgets" in the link text, that page will have an even higher reputation for being about "blue widgets", and so on. We are back to a voting system, where one page votes for another.

On-page text is much less important than the information provided in the incoming link text. A page can rank well for phrases that are not even found on the page, simply by having a lot of links pointing to it with that phrase in the link text.

Now, before you start thinking that you should get all of your incoming links to your "blue widget" site to use the link text "blue widgets", think again.

Imagine what a search engine would think if it saw a page with 100 incoming links, all with the exact same link text. This would almost certainly start the alarm bells ringing since 100 links with identical link text is unnatural.

If those links occurred naturally (i.e. webmasters linked to your site because of its value to their visitors), the link text in all of those incoming links would not be identical, they would vary.

Identical link text tells the search engine "link manipulation" (building links with link exchanges etc, which the search engines actually don’t like).

You need to make your incoming links look natural.

Now there is a very positive side to this. By varying your link text, you can start to rank well for a range of terms, without having to stuff keywords onto your pages.

There are two broad categories of incoming links to a page. Those that come from the same site, and those that come from other sites.

Let’s consider the links from the same site, i.e. where one page of your site links to another. An example of this would be where you have a menu on your pages that link to other pages. It is common to use the same link text in these menus, on all pages. For this reason, I don’t believe a search engine would consider it over-optimization, or spam, to have the same menu, and the same link text, on all of your pages of a site if you are using a menu.

So what about incoming links from other sites?

Well, here you do expect link text to be different unless you have manipulated your incoming links by telling those linking to you to only to use a specific phrase. This will get you into trouble. When getting links from other webmasters, use a variety of link texts, targeting different phrases.

My Advice:

For on site menus, simplify things by using the same menu on all pages (and same link text).

For incoming links from other sites: Choose 3 main phrases to begin with. Create the link text and a description around each of these 3 phrases, and alternate them. Get your partners to use one of the three. By the time you have 100 links to your site, you will have roughly 33 links using each of the three link texts.

When you find that your page is ranking well for one of these target phrases, start concentrating on the other 2 phrases, or select a new one to replace the one that is ranking well. Keep alternating and swapping the link texts and descriptions pointing to your page.

Remember that the link text tells the search engines what your page is about, so use it wisely. As you build incoming links, your PR will increase and your link reputation will reinforce what your page is about. As the reputation and PR rise, so will your rankings.

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