Appendix A - Website Design Do’s and Don’t s

Link factors include that portion of the Google algorithm that determines page importance, which in turn is primarily dependent on PageRank (PR) – the quantity and strength of links that point to your site . However, the concept of link quality is also an important factor, which is not part of the PageRank calculation.

Strictly speaking, link quality is determined by keyword factors , which was the topic of the previous section of the book, but is listed here because of it’s close tie-in with your link exchange efforts.

Introducing PageRank

In a nutshell, PageRank (PR) measures the quantity of incoming links to a given web page and their relative strength . When one page links to another, it “casts a vote” for that page in the form of a PageRank value.

In general, the more links you have that point to your site the better, as this increases the PageRank of the page being linked to. The number of links that point to a site is also sometimes called link popularity .

However, the amount of PageRank value these links “forward” on to your site, and hence the amount that is used in the Google PageRank calculation, is diluted by the presence of other links on the same page. This is where link strength comes into play.

The greater the number of other links on a page, the weaker the strength of each individual link. Each link is essentially a “vote” for the page being linked to, and the strength of that “vote” is divided equally among all other links on the page. Which means, all other things being equal, if someone has a link to your site on their page with 100 other links, you won’t get any appreciable value from that link in the overall calculation, UNLESS the page has a very high PageRank score. Confused? All will be explained in the next chapter!