Are Links Dead – Insight from Hilltop
I have been in the SEO community for almost three years now. It has been a strange and interesting trip.
Many times in forums, communication with other SEOs, blog posts and others I have seen many people with the opinion that links died with the onset of the “Florida Update,” which, consequently enticed me into the world of Search Engine Optimization and turned the ideas and ideals of online marketers on their heads. It was wonderful.
It leveled the playing field, gave everyone a chance to build a better Internet. The one’s that it negatively affected (maybe not all of them) are the people who were attempting to artificially inflate their websites, there is a difference between marketing yourself effectively and trying to corner the market. This, of course is my opinion. I know a lot of webmasters that are still extremely bitter about the whole thing, but isn’t change important?
Oh well, back on topic…
When asked if I think that links are not valuable anymore, I only have to break out my copy of the Hilltop Paper and point out a very important passage:
When searching the WWW broad queries tend to produce a large result set. This set is hard to rank based on content alone, since the quality and “authoritativeness” of a page (namely, a measure of how authoritative the page is on the subject) cannot be assessed solely by analyzing its content.
Not to say that content isn’t important, but it is not everything!
More importantly they went a step further and said:
Our approach is based on the same assumptions as the other connectivity algorithms, namely that the number and quality of the sources referring to a page are a good measure of the page’s quality. The key difference consists in the fact that we are only considering “expert” sources – pages that have been created with the specific purpose of directing people towards resources.
So, what is an expert document?
In other words what makes a page an expert? We felt than an expert page needs to be objective and diverse: that is, its recommendations should be unbiased and point to numerous non-affiliated pages on the subject.
They conclude with:
We described a new ranking algorithm for broad queries called Hilltop and the implementation of a search engine based on it. Given a broad query Hilltop generates a list of target pages which are likely to be very authoritative pages on the topic of the query. This is by virtue of the fact that they are highly valued by pages on the WWW which address the topic of the query. In computing the usefulness of a target page from the hyperlinks pointing to it, we only consider links originating from pages that seem to be experts. Experts in our definition are directories of links pointing to many non-affiliated sites. This is an indication that these pages were created for the purpose of directing users to resources, and hence we regard their opinion as valuable.
Through their findings and analysis of their hilltop experiment, they found that:
Average precision at 10 for Hilltop was 0.77, roughly equal to the best search engine, namely Google, with a precision of 0.79 at rank 10.
Now, Google may be using something that once resembled this algorithm. But, who cares? The paper and the concept are not hard to grasp and they make perfect sense.
So, to boil down my response: Are Links Dead?
No, but don’t get a link just to get a link. A link to your website is only as important as the reputation of the site giving it to you.
But, why would someone link to you, because you are a good link builder or because you provide something important or enriching to their visitors. So, why not work on giving others something to link to, namely well-written, relative, unique, quality CONTENT?
Related Posts >>
- Alexa.com
- The Top 13 Posts for 2006 from Build a Better Website
- Link Reputation
- MSN vs Link Exchanges
- Memorial Day
