Since its foundation, the method of measuring links to a website have been improved. It has been modified a little to place more emphasis on the quality of a link rather than on the amount of links that a website is linked with.



Measuring Link Quality

One of the basis for the relevance and quality of a link is the anchor text. We can say that the anchor text serves as the “text link" for the link and the keyword or keyword phrase. Links with the proper relevant anchor text are usually given greater value than links with anchor texts like “Click Here" or “Read More." For example, if your website is about a lawn care company in Boise, “Boise Lawn Care" will gain more weight as an anchor text than a “Click Here" anchor text will.

Semantic attributes of the page where the link is placed is also taken into serious consideration. The web page has to be related to the link, and vice versa, for the link to be valuable and relevant. Taking our example of the lawn care company, if the link is placed in a web page that only talks of hotels or beaches and nothing about lawn care, then that link is not considered as relevant as a link within a related content.

The search engine crawlers also take into account the relationships between linked sites. This is why webmasters would only do link exchanges with sites related to theirs. The search engines try to determine if the links linked together are organic (which are valuable and quality links) or manipulative and artificial (obviously for ranking purposes only).

Another factor that is given importance when crawling for links is weight and trustworthiness of the domain that you are linked with. These domains are those that have high PR in the search engines and are trusted by the great majority of the online community. CNN, National Geographic, and The New York Times are such domains. Linking with these domains will give your link more relevance and quality.

Given the amount of trust and worth that these domains have, one can guess that a link from one of these is a great boost to your own website. If you compare CNN with a small random website, a link from CNN would give more credibility to your website, thereby increasing your site's popularity. A link from the unpopular website, however, will only give you that extra one small vote. When you put the two together, it is correct to state that one link from a trusted and popular domain is worth more than links from 50 unknown websites.

The drive to provide great content and information is what propels search engines to produce an algorithm that would highlight link quality. Websites that mainly focus on link quantity rather than link quality are not popular anymore. Links that come with quality, after all, is aligned with worth and trust.