How Links Power Search Results
August 20, 2007
I've been talking a lot lately about the power of links when influencing Google's search results. In particular, I've been showing how Google ranks pages based on the keywords found in the link text that are aimed directly at those pages.
However, getting links to your site helps your ranking for more than just the individual page that the links are aimed at. Getting links to your home page, for example, for a certain set of keywords will also help your site's inner pages rank for what are called "long tail" keywords. I'll get into what those are shortly.
To illustrate: let's say you have a content site about Home-Made Widgets. Big widgets, small widgets, green widgets, blue widgets — if it relates to widgets, you've got an article about it on your site.
However, what if most of the links for your Home-Made Widgets site are aimed at your home page, and most of the anchor texts of those links relates to Home-Made Widgets in general, not the more specific varieties of home-made widgets? Would you expect your site's inner pages to receive traffic because of the links you have pointed at your home page?
The first answer that comes to your mind might be "No." Since all of your links are aimed at your home page, they are only helping the ranking of your home page.. right?
Wrong.
Having home-page links related to the general subject of your site will also help your inner pages rank for what have come to be known as "long tail keywords." A "long tail keyword" is just a super-targeted set of keywords that usually contains quite a few terms. For example, "Home-Made Widgets" is not a long tail keyword, but "Small Home-Made Widgets in Dallas Texas" is.
In my experience with Google, I've found Google to basically work like this:
- A user types in a search term (say, "Small Home-Made Widgets in Dallas Texas").
- Google scans its index to find all of the pages whose actual text is related to the search query, and those pages are arranged according to how closely they are related to the query.
- Google then checks to see if any of those pages have links to them that contain the search query. The list of results is then rearranged, with the pages with the most relevant links being first.
- Now Google checks to see if any of the sites that the related pages are found on are an "authority" on the subject at hand. This authority is based on the number and quality of links aimed at the site as a whole, and not just the specific page. The results are then rearranged again with this "authority" mixed into the rankings. It's this last set of results that is actually displayed to the user.
Now, that's a simplified view of what I perceive to be going on underneath Google's hood, and the order of the operations may not be just right, but from my experience and study of the search engine it appears to be a pretty accurate assessment.
Just because a page doesn't have links aimed directly at it does not mean that the page will not rank well for a given set of keywords. If your site is perceived by Google as having enough "authority" on the subject in general, the page may even outrank pages that do have direct links to them.
Since very few people are actually optimizing pages for the billions of possible long tail keywords ("Small Home-Made Widgets in Dallas Texas", for example), Google often reverts to the authority of the sites as a whole to see what should be ranked first.
Let me give a good example of this happening.
Here's a screenshot of the top results Google is currently showing for the phrase "article marketing for long tail keywords":
The #1 ranking result is from doshdosh.com, and the #2 result is from searchengineguide.com. This set of rankings is defying a couple of generally accepted (false) notions about how Google ranks sites.
First of all, the doshdosh.com result page has no PageRank (the doshdosh.com homepage is a PR4), and the searchengineguide.com result has a PR4 (the searchengineguide.com homepage is a PR7). So all of searchengineguide.com's PageRank isn't doing it one lick of good, despite the pervasive myth that PageRank matters (which it doesn't).
Digging deeper into the linking of the two results makes things even more confusing if you don't understand how Google views a site's "authority". The doshdosh.com result, according to Yahoo!, has only 50 in-bound links from sites other than itself, whereas the searchengineguide.com result has 131.
Now, it's hard to believe that anybody would be linking to either of these pages with keywords that aren't at least somewhat related to the page content most of the time, given the extremely targeted focus of both articles. I checked both pages' backlinks using SEO Elite (an outstanding SEO tool), and sure enough, the link texts pointed at both sites very often contain the phrase "long tail" and the words "keyword" or "keywords". So the few links both sites have are targeted about the same.
It might seem odd that the page with far more links is being out-ranked by a "lesser" page, but it starts to make more sense once we look at the total volume of links that both sites have. You see, even though the doshdosh.com site has only 50 links to the specific results page, the site as a whole has 181,223 links. Compare that to the searchengineguide.com site, which has 168,144 links: more than 13,000 fewer links than doshdosh.com.
In terms of percentages, it may not seem like much (13,000 links is 7% of 168,144), but that's just enough extra "authority" for Google's algorithm to decide that the doshdosh.com page should rank #1 for the phrase instead of searchengineguide.com's page: even though the page itself has fewer links.
It's this kind of Google "authority" measurement that causes sites like Wikipedia to rank for a huge array of diverse keywords, even though the Wikipedia entry itself may not be heavily linked. Google rates the site as a whole based on its total volume and quality of links, and (currently anyway) its algorithm is deciding that this "authority" makes its entries worthy of out-ranking other sites whose individual result pages may have more links than the Wikipedia article. And how many links does the Wikipedia.org site have? According to Yahoo!, 75,226,779. Now that's a lot of authority!
The bottom line is that you want to get links to your inner pages, but don't forget to make sure your whole site is well linked also. And be sure to include a variety of related keywords in your articles and site content even though you're not getting links for those specific long tail keywords. Google will often rank your pages for these long tail keywords based only on the "authority" it has assigned to your site.
Hundreds of webmasters are seeing incredible results using 3WayLinks.net to get their sites well-linked in Google's eyes (myself included). I certainly recommend you get yourself an account with 3WL if you're wanting to rank your sites well in Google.
Please post your comments below!
Comments
29 Responses to “How Links Power Search Results”
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Jonathan Leger has been earning his living online full-time since the fall of 2004. He regularly posts advice about search engine optimization (his current passion), AdSense and Internet Marketing. 
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Fantasic article Jon. I have done research myself on a number of sites and my results resemble your findings.
Boy, am I confused about Three Way Links, Jonathan. From your side, Three Way Linking is a godsend. Then you have totally different views from both Charles Heflin and Jerry West.
Here's what I read yesterday from Charles Heflin's course material:
"You may have heard of three way linking. Three way linking is a form of trickery that Google hates. Recently Jerry West met with a Google engineer and the engineer showed Jerry how easy it was to spot 3 way link exchanges. Stay away from them unless you want your site to get banned from the Google index."
So who's right about Three Way Linking?
Thanks, Jonathan…
~ Darryl
I have a different theory, but I arrive to exactly the same conclusions
I assume that there is virtually no difference between an internal and an external link.
What makes all of us think that our internal links are not as efficient as external links comes from the fact that our sites are generally not well established, and hence have limited linking power.
I assume that the power of a link is more or less proportional to its ranking. In other words, the linking power for a page ranking #1 on the term 'widget' is much better than the linking power of the page ranking 100 or 1000.
So, if your home page ranks very well for 'widgets', it will boost any long tail keyword page, that is not too many click away from your home page.
There is a second factor which I believe has even more influence: authority. I am convinced that any link from an obscure PR0 page from microsoft.com or IBM.com has a lot more power than an artificially boosted PR7 page from a site selling text link ads. Authority is hard to quantify (anyone has an idea ?). I suppose Google has a white list of authority sites manually maintained. Apparently, the authority level drops very quickly. I read you keep only 1/3 of the authority after one click, but this is pure supposition.
I am not convinced that Google has 2 different algorithms for long tail and short tail keyword. I believe it is a matter of balance between on page and off page factors.
Because very few anchor texts contain long tail keywords, all pages are 'equal' in the long tail race, and the onsite factors probably prevail. This explains why a new site usually ranks easily for a long tail.
Hello Jonathan,
great post (as usual)
I never noticed long tail keywords before (even heard about it at all), but your articles makes me to start thinking about whole that procedure.
Thank you so much and just keep doing that way!
Greetings from Croatia!
3 way links? why do they consider this 1 way link? I need to do some research on it, also what happens if it becomes a tree A>B>C&D&E&F ?
Darryl:
According to the proof shown by hundreds of webmasters with top 10 rankings, I'd say I'm right. Are the people you're quoting showing any actual real evidence of this occurring? Myth is often perpetuated as "fact" without evidence.
Yeh Jon kind of common sense for most folks but some don't understand the power of linking and of long tails. On my blog I talk all about dominating the serps by leveraging the power of authoritive domains and web 2.0. My theory is a little different…I talk about how I can dominate the serps by leveraging everybody elses link juice and authority and thats how and why many of my long tail keywords I show up 5,6,7 and even 8 times in the top ten for the ones that I actually work on. Then leveraging my link juice of my site by targeting such long tail phrases. This is why my site in 7 months of business is already doing over 20 k a month. Thats reality of an seo! BTW the new blog I started not even a week ago did 164 hits today alone without any SEO!
James Dean Nash
As usual another great article. You amaze me in that you can take a subject that is sometimes hard to understand and make it seem easy to understand. Continue your great work. I enjoy getting your emails that alert me to new subject matter that you did.
Keep it up,
Steve
Great Article , very helpful. I like your site, tons of useful info.
Cheers
Your article together with the sample really make sense. I used to think PR rules everything but unfortunately it is not as demonstrated by you. Awesome!! This is really eyes opener
With regard to comments about 3-way linking, there is a difference between Jon's 3-waylinks.net program and what some people do to get links articifially.
If you set up 3 sites - A, B and C and place links on site A to Site B, then place links on Site B to Site C, then place links on Site C back to A, it is a perfect 3-way link system that is blatantly set up to overcome the search engines.
However, using Jon's 3-waylinks.net program, you are giving links to other sites, who are providing links to different sites to the ones you are linking to, and different sites are then linking to you. Obviously, some of the sites that you are linking to may also be linked to by others in your trio, but most of the sites in your 'triangle of links' are not the sites that are linking back to you.
What I mean by this is that you are linking to 250 various sites, who are linking to other sites, who are linking to a third lot of sites. However, it is not necessarily all the sites in that 2nd link that are linking back to you, so you are getting genuine 1-way links to your site.
By the same token, many of the sites that you link to are receiving genuine 1-way links from you, because the sites that they link to are not the same sites as link back to you.
I know this sounds complicated, but I am not as good at explaining as Jon is : - )
Have a great day.
I'm a user of 3-way-link for slighly more than a month and my Adsense income has increased by more than 30%. I wonder what will happen to my income when all the 250 links are established.
ur article really fascinate me. im not sure when I subscribe to u but dia past months, I kept reading ur articles. keep up the good work !
Ok I am going to comment about the 3 way links since everyone else is too.
Ok, will Google figure it out..probably not..is it worth $50 bucks a month..HMMM maybe it just depends if you are seeing growth in your serp's then maybe it's worth $600 bucks a year for however long you stay in the system, which if you see higher rankings then you are pretty much locked in forever unless you want to lose the serps! Kudos to you Jon for a great money making member site. I need to start one myself.
Think about it wouldn't learning SEO and doing things the right way be easier…Which what is the right way..following all the rules, abiding by Googles terms..NO! The right way is what is working for you. Sure learning SEO is going to take some work heck it took me 3 years of non stop studying before I even felt confident enough to launch my first site and you know it paid off big time..6 figures big. And now I can and have repeated this process many times already and I am a millionaire…not to brag just saying I can build another site and instantly believe it will do just as good if not better. So it's just up to you. If you want to have to pay for your serps then go ahead. Which I believe this system will never be able to beat an SEO not on it's best day.
So why not just take the easy street and have some script do the work for you if it does work…..which I am sure you will see some growth in your serp's but enough growth to constitute locking you in for as long as you want them serp's just depends if you ever want to grow a business. Also you will always be wondering..will I get banned..well I highly doubt that, not quite big enough for Google to give a crap..
My 2 Cents
James Dean Nash
Just had to chime in on 3waylinks.net. I'm sure it "works". For now. But don't deceive yourself that this is not a "linking scheme" and violates Google's webmaster guidelines:
{snip: long url was messing up the page format}
Jon's a clever programmer and marketer. No doubt about it. Has my respect. 3waylinks is probably very good at not leaving a footprint. I wouldn't know. But when you post a comment with a link to your site and say that you use 3waylinks….
Don't get me wrong. I'm not, as we say down here, a "dobber". I had a look at Kenneth's site above. It's good quality and deserves to rank well. But if I was competing with you on the same keywords, and read in a public forum that you were using a linking scheme to boost PR and rankings, and you were outranking me, well….
My point is this guys. Things like 3waylinks can and do help boost rankings. But don't kid yourself that you're not manipulating Google. Be honest with yourself. If you want to particpate in such schemes then go for it. Just make sure you are aware of the risks, which are quite real, especially if use it on your main business site. Sites do get shut down. It's happened to me. Once bitten, twice shy. What's more, you don't have to participate in schemes to get good quality links.
The article is good, no doubt in it. Linking is very important whether it is inner linking or incoming links to the website. However a request to you, please do not try to promote your products through every post you make. We are aware of your programs and we find some as excellent and some not worth it. I do not consider this linking software as good because we have to give out links as well in order to get links and that also from un related sites and low rank sites.
No doubt, i appreciate your excellence and articles.
Hi Jonathan,
Great stuff as usual. I love the way you really get to the meat of this SEO stuff and I encourage all my subscribers to get their hands on your information.
Keep up the good work mate,
regards
Roy Carter
Steve:
I find Google's stand rather two-faced on this. Their Webmaster Guidelines says clearly that you should "have other relevant sites link to yours." It's their #1 recommendation. It also says, "make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online."
I ask: how is 3WL a violation of those guidelines?
"Oh," they might say, "that's not what we meant. We meant natural links." Wait a minute, though–you said to get other people to link to you, but you meant that other people should link to you without you knowing about it?
My feelings are these: Google is against anything that works really well. They feel like they're being manipulated if the steps you take work fast. Again, they're two-faced here, because it's their manipulation of other people's content that has made them the multi-billion dollar empire they are today.
Oh, and if Google has such a problem with purchased links, why do they allow dozens of AdWords advertisers to sell them on their search results?
Me, I'll just keep doing what works. And 3WL works like a champ.
Sahil:
I appreciate your thoughts, and will be more cognizant of that in the future.
Roy:
Thanks!
Jon is right plainly…I believe the system will work but not better than a SEO but you WILL see growth in the serps.
Yes Google says things about manipulating the search results…SO what! I see this all of the time and Google doesn't do anything…Google also says natural links..If it looks like a natural link, smells like a natural link then it probably is a natural link. Quit being so scared that Google is going to ban you…Google likes to put on more than what they actually know escpecially the people they pay to spin information.
I found a little thread that you need to read http://www.seobook.com/archives/002389.shtml
[…] Jonathan says, "I've been talking a lot lately about the power of links when influencing Google's search results. In particular, I've been showing how Google ranks pages based on the keywords found in the link text that are aimed directly at those pages". How Links Power Search Results… […]
Great find James!
Steve
Right off the bat I am going to say I am not a memeber of 3 way links and dont plan on it because I am an SEO.
But you said this is a linking scheme….HMMM maybe but does Google know this or will Google ever find out…not very likely. You said it violates Google's terms of service…HMMM maybe but what about all those people out their buying links, getting reported that they bought linksand Google does nothing about this. You know in my niche their is one site that has around 400k links from just one site with the same anchor text in every link of the 400k and you know what they keep moving up in the serps. Now wouldnt you think Google would be able to detect 400k links from one site pointing to the next with the same anchor text. You would think so…But it's not happening yet and it probably won't. Now something so obvious should be detected right? No, because like I said before Google put's on more than what they actually know. So don't worry if someone can buy their serp's and very, very easily have it detected like 400k links from the same site and nothing is done then 3 way links will definitely not get detected. Now don't get me wrong I am not saying go and do this, but if you have a little extra money..like the price of a cup of coffee a day and you want to get some extra link juice….then 3 way links will grow your serps…And take it from me a guy who already has many 6 figure websites this system will help you out…
[…] Jonathan Leger gave the autorisation to republish one of his articles that is a trememdous must read. You can also download his free pdf on 3 way linking or read more about his top notch product Linking strategy . […]
what i would like to know is how do I get 150 000 links point to my site?
Like I thought i was doing OK with 500
I just dont know how the average person could cheive that!
I spent a lot of time doing exchanges and it is such a pain, going to all the trouble in the first place, but then you get all the cheaters who that your link away or put it on a page that is not accessable from their home page.
Man its a hard road!
Makes sense to me. Defintely worth a try. I'm trying, but can't get the links page right. Followed the video, but the page title from 3way writed over my header. What's a newbie to do?
"Me, I'll just keep doing what works. And 3WL works like a champ."
I'm not arguing that it doesn't Jon. But it's not the only thing that works. And it's risky, no matter how good you think sites using it will be at avoiding detection. My point is this, if you are a small business owner and your site represents that business, and that site means everying to you, then you need to tread carefully, and NOT post in a public forum (with links to your site) that you belong to a link exchange scheme which is working wonderfully well. If you run multiple sites with multiple sources of income - adsense, affiliate etc, and can afford to cop the odd penalty, different story.
Steve, James and Shaun, this is not the place for you guys to duke it out. I've deleted those comments (except for the part of Steve's that was directed to me). All additional comments between you will be deleted. Please keep this kind of stuff on the forums. Thanks.
Ok cool Jon that's fine but when someone is stalking me on forums and badmouthing me when they obviously no nothing about SEO or marketing in general is not a cool thing to do….coming from a guy who says seo is just text and links degrades every seo around and the hard work we do.
Later
Jon
Aaaahhh. THAT'S how Wikipedia ranks! Of course.
Noone every spotted this before, or at least if they knew they never wrote about it. And I just could never figure it out.
Some people insisted that Google ranks based on the individual page alone, and that PageRank - or direct links matter. Aaaaaah.
But time and time again we've seen single big sites on multiple, random topics that seem to always rank well - for just about anything.
Damn.
Yes, That's how they do it.
Now, when you say it, it seems obvious that there is some kind of "authoratitiveness" being measured for the site and that this authority is more important than practically anything else. Wow.
Thanks for clearing this up for me.
Luke
PS: Does this suggest that having fewer sites (or one site) could be the best policy - so that your promotion is always focussed? You have to admit that it does mean this.