Last week Yahoo! transitioned their search engine backend to pull results from Microsoft’s Bing. The result is that Yahoo will *look* the same, but the results will now come from Bing. This will allow Microsoft and Yahoo to combine their resources for indexing and allow their advertisers a larger market share, as well as significantly reducing Yahoo operational costs. An understandable play given circumstances. Yahoo was on the verge of going bankrupt without this intersession. Casualties of this transition, however, include Yahoo’s Link and LinkDomain legacy search functions.
Advanced parameters such as inurl, intitle, site, etc. This has caused a bit of a panic in some of the SEO circles. In particular, I want to discuss with you today why knowing how many .gov and .edu links are going to a page or a domain is superfluous.
This gave me a moment to pause and actually look at our Competitive White Paper Report and what is on offer there.
The primary purpose of this report is for you to understand your top competitors and realize what it takes to compete for that keyword. You can then assess the cost and decide if this particular term is important enough to your USP to warrant obtaining. Predominantly we are talking about inbound links.
Let’s talk about inbound links for a moment. What you should know about them and how one inbound link is not like another.
An inbound link has several things that impact the value of the link to your ranking strategy:
- A theme
- A page rank
- A link to your site
- This link might have anchor text
- There may be more than your link(s) on this page
The page that contains the link to your site has a page rank, or a ‘value of authority’. When it links to your site, it is casting a vote for your site – and that link will pass a percentage of the page rank from that page.
Now that value is divided for every outbound link on that page. So if you are the only link, that’s great, you get all the link juice that page has to offer. If it’s linking to 10 places, then you get 1/10 of the link juice that page has to offer. You start to see why a “reciprocal link page” is pretty useless.
Now let’s look at the page itself. What is the page rank? A page rank of zero does not have really any link juice to pass. A page rank of 1 has *some*. However a page rank of 2 has more than 2x as much as a page rank 1. It’s not a linear progression, it’s exponential – it’s actually a log function. Think about it, if 10 is the max page rank, then that has to be more than 10x better than a page rank of 1.
For those who are into pictures, an exponential when graphed looks something like this (I’m not saying this is how Google weights PR, this is just to give you a visual of what I’m talking about):
This shows page rank on the X axis, progressing from O on the left to 10 on the right; and inbound links up the side, on the Y axis, where O is at the bottom and virtual infinity, or the largest value for inbound links is at the top.
The curve depends on how you weight the elements being calculated, however, it’s generally accepted that a page rank of 5 or above is “really good”; 3 and 4 are “ok” and 0-2 are not links that I actively pursue.
Within the SEO community you’ll occasionally find mention of inbound links from .gov and .edu domains. So what is the fuss with the .gov and .edu links? Typically these sites have a lot of page rank. When you start to see a high percentage of the links from .gov and .edu, you know there is a lot of page rank being passed. But it’s not MAGIC. Those sites are not weighted heavier just because they are .gov and .edu – they are rated higher because they are authority sites, lots of people link to them, and they pass a *lot* of page rank.
But no more than any other page with the same page rank.
The other thing that I have to say is that all the mystique around the .gov and .edu links has caused people to go pretty far out of their way trying to find blogs and forums on .edu domains where they can post comments or SOMETHING … *ANYTHING* – just to get a link back to their site. Most of these links end up being on pages that have a page rank of ZERO. And yes, a .edu with a page rank of zero passes the same link juice as any other page with a page rank of Zero – so you can see what they got for their trouble… Nothing!
Other blogs or forums will have SOME page rank, but their links are no-follow, so guess what – yap… for all that work they still got Nothing… So this whole .gov and .edu thing has had people going around in some very small circles, chasing their tail and not getting anywhere.
For this reason, we have decided to pull the .gov and .edu references from our Competitive White Paper.
There are other places where we could get the data still, and if you are so inclined, you can obtain this data; however it has always been our policy to help people learn solid SEO practices that are evergreen and will help them build their online business to withstand the test of time.
