We have a very interesting piece of SEO related news this week in that Google have just been granted a new patent titled ‘determining quality of linked documents’ which is able to give us further insight and understanding as to the ways in which Google judges the influence of links to a website and the effect which this has on search positions.
Google Patent
Below is the official patent abstract which gives a brief insight into the way Google looks at in-bound links:
“A ranking component ranks documents, such as web pages or web sites, to obtain a ranking score that defines a quality judgment of the document. The ranking score of a particular document is based on the ranking score of the documents which link to it and based on affiliation among the documents.”
Effect of Links on Rankings
From this, we can see that Google may rank links differently depending on the relationship which pages have with one another, essentially meaning that not all links are treated the same in the eyes of Google.
An example which we can use here is that links from pages which share author may have a lower impact on rankings for a website which has no affiliation with the linked site.
Website Affilliation
We are also provided with an image which we can use to see how various websites are related:
It is highly possible that Google may assign a maximum value for links that come from affilliated sites and may assign individual values for links which are from independent pages. Therefore, four links from an affilliated website may carry a higher ranking value than just one link, but it is likely that the overall value of links from the affilliated site is limited.
Methods of Affilliation
In the patent, we can also see a number of methods used by Google to determine affilliation of pages such as;
- interlinking (websites which are more closely linked to one another than an average page)
- hostnames (the idea that webpages with the same domain or subdomains may be affilliated)
- IP addresses (the idea that if the first couple of components of an IP are the same, pages may be affilliated)
- visitors (if pages share many visitors during a browing session, they may be thought to be affilliated)
Conclusions From Google’s New Patent
Therefore, when planning link campaigns, is it now more essential than ever to obtain links from as many different, independent, sources as possible and it is likely that automated linking schemes will be flagged to Google. What is important is the quality of links rather than the quantity of links and this furthers the idea that large numbers of links from link farms may be no more useful than a smaller number of genuine links from independent locations.
