Customer Street SEO Articles & Help

EVERY search engines primary goal is to provide the best quality, most relevant search results possible and the way each search engine does this varies considerably. As most of you know Google has successfully established itself as the search engine of choice and one of the key aspects in the way Google’s decides its search results is website cross linking.

The Problem - Spam

Before the arrival of Google, search engines primarily used “on page factors” to decide their search results. Aspects such as content, keyword repetition, Meta tags and domain names were all used to decide how relevant a site was to a particular search. The problem with using these “on-page factors” to determine rankings was the ease with which webmasters could abuse the criteria to their advantage. This resulted in high-end search engine results which were full of sub-standard sites. This in turn meant it was far harder for the user to find the right result for their query.

The Solution - Links

The idea behind Google placing so much emphasis on cross linking was that this would represent an accurate score of how successful a website is and therefore reduce the amount of sub-standard sites at the top of the search engine rankings. Links were seen as a vote of confidence from one site to another – the more people link to you, the better you are in your particular field.

Link Navigation

This particular way of ranking sites has become a staple of Google’s ranking algorithm and forms the basis of PageRank. However, there is another advantage to Google placing so much weight on linking. By encouraging sites to link to each other Google has, in fact, made it a lot easier for its own search spiders to navigate the internet and index new and fresh content – resulting in better results for its users.

Links offer the search engine spiders paths through the web – from page to page, site to site and server to server. When trying to explain this principal to a complete internet novice I like to use the analogy of towns, roads and cars. The town is a website, the roads coming into that town are the links and the cars are the search engine spiders. If a town had no in-roads then there is no way for the search engine spiders to find it and the more in-roads, the better!

Quick Indexing

Linking has become so important to the way Google maintains its index that it is no longer necessary to manually submit new sites or pages. If you create a new website and establish links from already high ranking sites your site WILL be found by Google’s spiders. A great example of this is the Bangor Roofing Indexing test conducted by Lee and Neil earlier this year.

I’m sure many of you have heard the phrase “content is king”, well if “content is king” then links are definitely the queen!

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