7 Characteristics to Help You Know How Google Evaluates Links

Google announced changes in the way they evaluate backlinks in last week. You may want to know how this affects your website rankings and how Google exactly evaluates links. The following article will show you some details.

As mentioned in Google’s statement, Google uses “characteristics of links” to figure out the topic of a linked page. Here we’ll take a look at the characteristics below.

Characteristic 1 – The Text of the link

A link’s anchor text has been the most important factor for a long time. For example, if many sites link to a page with the anchor text “SEM agency” then the page will get high rankings for the term “SEM agency”.

Characteristic 2 – Content and page proximity

If you sell search engine marketing tools on your website, then the link to your website will have a bigger impact if the text that surrounds the link to your page is about search engine marketing software tools. If the link to your website is surrounded by totally unrelated text, then the link won’t count as much.

Characteristic 3 – The link power of the linking page

Compared with links from pages with few backlinks, links from pages with many inbound links have a higher influence.

Characteristic 4 – Link attributes such as nofollow and title

Links with the rel=nofollow attribute don’t affect the position of your web pages on Google. Some webmasters think that using title attribute containing the targeted keywords can have a positive effect. Others think that this could trigger a spam filter.

Characteristic 5 – Redirects and shortened URLs

Redirects and shortened URLs such as http://www.adsage.com/ are URLs that redirect to another URL. When it comes to calculate the position of a website, should these URLs carry full weight?

Characteristic 6 – The affiliation of the linking sites

Compared with links from websites that are not affiliated with the page, links from websites that have the same owner and links from affiliates may have a different influence on the rankings of a web page.

Characteristic 7 – The age of a website

The older a link is, the more Google tends to trust that link. Generally, links that remain for a long time seem to have a bigger impact than links that come and go.

Of course, we can only speculate what Google has changed. But we can get some useful information from the above characteristics. Hope it helps!

Article from:
http://adsage.wordpress.com/2012/03/07/7-characteristics-to-help-you-know-how-google-evaluates-links/