These are link position and page traffic. What can we say about these factors? And different link locations affect link value. John Mueller confirmed that , saying that links placed within the main content weigh more than all the other ones:.
This is the area of the page where you have your primary content, the content that this page is actually about, not the menu, the sidebar, the footer, the header… Then that is something that we do take into account and we do try to use those links.
So, footer links and navigation links are said to pass less weight. And this fact from time to time gets confirmed not only by Google spokesmen but by real-life cases.
In a recent case presented by Martin Hayman at BrightonSEO , Martin added the link he already had in his navigation menu to the main content of the pages.
Though we don't have much proof here but for what Matt Cutts said when Google was actively fighting excessive guest blogging for backlinks. John Mueller clarified the way Google treats traffic and user behavior in terms of passing link juice in one of the Search Console Central hangouts. A user asked Mueller if Google considers click probability and the number of link clicks when evaluating the quality of a link. Google does not consider link clicks and click probability when evaluating the quality of the link.
Google understands that links are often added to content like references, and users are not expected to click every link they come across. The study revealed that there's hardly any correlation. Moreover, some top-ranked pages turned out to have no backlinks from traffic-rich pages at all. On the other hand, extra traffic has never done any harm to any website.
The only message here is that traffic-rich backlinks do not seem to influence Google rankings. As you remember, Google introduced the nofollow tag in as a way to fight link spam. Has something changed today? Actually, yes. First, Google has recently introduced two more types of the nofollow attribute. These two new attributes now work the same way as an ordinary nofollow tag. Second, Google now says the nofollow tags, as well as the new ones, sponsored and ugc , are treated as hints, rather than a directive when indexing pages.
In addition to incoming links, there are also outgoing links, i. Reboot Online carried out an experiment in and re-ran it in They created 10 websites with word articles, all optimized for an unexisting keyword - Phylandocic.
As a result, those websites with authoritative outgoing links started ranking the highest, and those having no links at all took the lowest positions. On the other hand, the search term in the research is brand new, and the content of the websites is themed around medicine and drugs. So there are high chances the query was classified as YMYL. So, the outlinks might have well been treated as an E-A-T signal, proving the pages have factually accurate content.
Besides, outgoing links may be beneficial for SEO, too, as they may be taken into account by Google AI when filtering the web from spam. Because spammy pages tend to have few outgoing links if any at all. They either link to the pages under the same domain if they ever think about SEO or contain paid links only. So, if you link to some credible resources, you kind of show Google that your page is not a spammy one.
There was once an opinion that Google could give you a manual penalty for having too many outgoing links, but John Mueller said that this is only possible when the outgoing links are obviously a part of some link exchange scheme, plus the website is in general of poor quality.
What Google means under obvious is actually a mystery, so keep in mind common sense, high-quality content, and basic SEO. Back in , Google was more likely to release manual actions for link manipulation and spam.
But now, with its well-trained anti-spam algorithms, Google is able to just ignore certain spammy links when calculating PageRank rather than downranking the whole website in general.
As John Mueller said,. This is also true about negative SEO when your backlink profile is compromised by your competitors:. In general, we do automatically take these into account and we try to… ignore them automatically when we see them happening. For the most part, I suspect that works fairly well.
I see very few people with actual issues around that. Probably we figured that out on our own. However, it doesn't mean you have nothing to worry about.
As Marie Haynes says in her advice on link management in To try to figure out what links are triggering the problem, you can use a backlink checker like SEO SpyGlass. In , Sergey Brin and Larry Page, together with some other academics at Stanford who likely regret not getting more heavily involved with what it became, developed and patented the system that would be trademarked as PageRank.
The patent for the system was granted to Stanford, and Brin and Page gave up shares in Google for exclusive rights to it. I remember having seen a show on chat rooms and attempted to find one where I could get some direction on where to find what I was looking for figuring if they were really popular they should be easy to find. This is not to say that the entire Google algorithm was based on links, but this was the first time links were used by a search engine in a meaningful way.
You can thank Google for that. PageRank had such a massive impact on the quality of search results that, within the span of a decade, it took Google from a startup to power 4 out of every 5 queries. Basically, it took the internet from a zone that this author left in frustration — to one that even the least technically proficient people could easily find mainly relevant information.
I was willing to burn sites to the ground knowing I had a dozen more coming up behind it, and probably a couple of others occupying additional positions for the queries I really wanted. Spending time trying to improve your PageRank is probably not the best use of your time.
But building relevant and authoritative backlinks to your website is an undeniably effective SEO strategy, and will likely improve your PageRank as a result. There are some factors you should know about that can positively impact your PageRank. Let's dive into a few of those, now.
The primary way to improve your PageRank is through backlinks. The more relevant, high authority websites that link to you — the higher your PageRank will be. Building backlinks is one of the best ways to grow your website, but it needs to be done properly. Be authentic, do not spam groups or communities, and most importantly — create content with which people can engage.
You also want to be sure you have cleaned up any bad backlinks. You can learn more about how to Disavow Links here. Getting links from directories or pages that have a lot of links is not as beneficial for improving PageRank. Every link on a page will dilute the value of your link, so while directory-type links can be valuable in other ways, they will not be a big help for improving RageRank.
One of the most underrated SEO tactics is internal linking. By using internal links to pass PageRank from one page to another, you can make a big impact on your rank and traffic. As an example — your homepage will usually have the highest PageRank because of the number of websites linking to it.
Every link from your homepage to another page on your website will boost the authority of the page being linked to. Additionally, consider using an SEO tool to identify pages within your website that have high authority, and adding links from those pages to lower-authority pages when relevant to give your pages a boost.
A quick trick is to look at your Google Analytics — usually the pages with the most organic traffic are the highest authority pages.
So you can start using those pages to build internal links to less authoritative pages to give them a quick boost, as long as the links are relevant to the content on the page. One of the biggest myths I can remember about external links is that linking out from your content can diminish the PageRank of that page. While the number of links on a page might affect the "value" of that link to the page being linked to, it does not harm your own. If you find a resource that is helpful for your viewers, then you should absolutely add a link to that resource.
A study done by Reboot showed that there was a positive correlation between rankings and the outbound links of a page. All those pages are going to send tons and tons of PageRank your way!
But important for what? They all link to you like this:. The importance of the links is less, true. But they do have some importance. They carry some weight. Plus, what they say — the relevancy of the words — is key. Search for something, then see if anything below the top ranked page has a PageRank score higher than the top listing. If so and it is so , that shows PageRank is not the most important factor. See how the search results have PageRank meters in them?
See how Movies. The page with a lower PageRank still got the higher search rank! Like seeing these scores in your results? Seem odd? It makes sense and underscores my key point. PageRank is one of many, many factors used to produce search rankings. It lists them in order of importance for what you searched on. Adding PageRank scores to search results would just confuse people. This is where PageRank makes more sense. The tool above is just one of many that does this got a favorite?
Those PageRank scores that you can see? Those scores are constantly being updated. That might concern you, even though it will mostly impact whether you get crawled regularly the higher your PageRank, the more likely Google will regularly revisit your pages.
It does also have an impact on your ranking ability, of course. You might see more traffic, as a result. But outwardly, the Google Toolbar PageRank meter will still show your same old depressing score. You can also try the Future PageRank tool if you hear from various sources that a PageRank update is in progress for the toolbar.
It might give you an early glimpse at your score to come.
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