Update on Linking Strategies for SEO on Google
Yesterday, I attended an SEO panel discussion at the AdTech convention in San Francisco. It was moderated by Bruce Clay who is an L.A.Internet Marketing Consultant. The other panelists were Sandor Marik who runs the web publishing arm of Conde Nast and Aaron D'Souza, Ph.D. from Google. They covered five major areas of their concern, but I wanted to know how the Google Page Rank Algorithm has evolved in the past year (this is the fourth time I have attended AdTech ). For overall coverage of the panel discussion, see the blog post of another attendee.
What I gleaned is that a recent evolution is the importance of linking strategies. We all know that a fundamental concept in Google that good-quality inbound links are crucial. Internal links are important, but only if they are meaningful. I know a guy who built a 100-page website in an effort to get higher page rank, but he did not put consistent navigation on every page so the spiders could not find all the content and his efforts were wasted. What was news to me is that External Links (your links to other pages) are now considered (more)
a fundamental part of linking strategy. Dr. D'Souza kept talking about "signals," and that a website's linking strategy "must make sense." The example they used is a page about Mustangs. If the external links are to Jaguar and Porsche, Google won't recognize it as a "Mustang" page, but put it in the much larger category "cars." The shift I see is that they are looking for "high-value" web sites, and these often include useful external links that are homogeneous in subject.
Bruce Clay seemed frustrated by Wikipedia's very successful linking strategy that propels it to the top of the results for many searches. Many people link to Wikipedia, so the page rank for the entire site is very high. There are many internal links within the articles so that people can find other related references within Wikipedia, and the external links in the articles are to high-value resources that are highly relevant to the Wikipedia page content.
So, Wikipedia is a successful blueprint for linking strategy success. The panelists emphasized that fresh content, genuine usefulness and spiderability are the keys to good page rank. When I asked them if it made any difference if the page code was valid, Dr. D'Souza muttered platitudes about standards-based websites being easier to spider. Bruce was more forthright, saying that he recently spent a lot of time and money to make his website compliant to the Transitional level because he knew it would make a difference.
But Dr. D'Souza stepped up and said that to prepare for presentation, he went to T.V. Raman, a very senior co-worker who often posts on Google Official Blog. Mr. Raman is blind, but spends a lot of time online, so he really appreciates website that are accesible to his machine that reads the site aloud. Dr. D'Souza told us that Google keeps a list of accessible sites so they can be found more easily. That was a golden nugget of info!