Love and Links

Key factors based on which Google can rank your site:

1. Age of site and how many years you have booked your domain
2. Content
3. Keyword richness in all sites (do not overdo it)
4. Logical content grouping among pages in the website
5. Resourcefulness of the site, like number of links, important sites you have listed, topics and what all you can think of

Be loved and get popular. We all know this from our daily life. This holds true in the world of Internet also. The traffic a website gets depends on its popularity. A more popular website gets more traffic. For a website to be popular it has to be useful to many people. If a website is found useful, many people will link to it from their website and this along with other factors decides the popularity and traffic to the website.

Anyone who has surfed the net will know what a link is. For those who do not, a link is a means by which one can jump from one website to another website. When we want to log on to a web site, we simply type in the URL of a website in a browser. The browser displays the relevant website. Suppose, we place the URL of a site on a website, it becomes possible to move from one site to another and it becomes a link.

All web pages have links. For instance, the home page of this site, i.e., www.vkinfotek.com, has links to websites related to the topics visual basic, .Net or Accounting.

Those who have a website will have at one time or another tried to get incoming links. An incoming link is a one which leads a surfer from one site to your website. If many websites link to your website, then your website is considered very important. For instance, a large number of websites link to New York Times site. It means that those websites which link to New York Times find it useful to link to it.

Google considers "Links" as major criteria for judging the usefulness of a website. In a market economy practiced by countries like US, UK since many and now being practiced actively by countries like India China and Brazil, people innovate by thinking how they can be more useful and generate business. It is similar in the Internet world too. The more value you can provide on your website, more websites will most likely link to yours. Let us now see how many links make a website popular in the eyes of Google. NYT has 236000 incoming inks. That is a huge number and it is no surprise that Google ranks it 10 out of 10. It is a well guarded secret as to how Google allots marks to "Links", though there are many experts listing out their own formulae which you can find on a Google Search.

To understand how Google grades links, it is easier to compare linking to striking relationships. A relationship has to be sustaining, can be positive or negative, be from a similar grouping, not one-sided and preferred from persons better than us, so that we stand to gain.

Similarly, a link has to be sustaining, can be positive or negative, be from a similar grouping, be one-sided and from better ranked sites so that we stand to gain.

Remember, the implication of a link is two ways. For one website, it is an incoming link, for another it is a outgoing link. A successful website is one which has as many incoming links as possible. It means that it may have outgrown the necessity of having reciprocal links.

A link, like a relationship has to be sustaining. Meaning, it should be present for a long time. Relationships can be sustaining or short lived. Google seems to judge this in great detail. It looks like Google puts all new links which are increasing rapidly in a sandbox, where it recognizes its presence, but does not give it any weightage. However, after a period, some say it is now nine months, some feel it is shorter, links start appearing. When you type in linkto:www.vkinfotek.com (change the site name to whichever site you want to, in the Google Search Box) Google returns the number which is below 20. However, MSN returns more than 500 incoming links. It is obvious that Google does not reveal incoming links and sandbox effect is operative. An interesting question here is why sandboxing for nine months? Is it story going around or is it true. Has Google fixed this timed based on statistics. Nine months is something we come across when we discuss childbirth.

Similar to a relationship, a link can be positive or negative. A negative relationship is one in which the parties suffer rather than benefit from the relationship. A positive relationship is one in which the referring site gives a vote to the referred site. Does Google categorize links as positive or negative? It seems so. Sites with incoming links from link farms are frowned upon by Google.

Not only does the referring website matter, what matters also are the words which surround the link. A similar set of words around the link may look like spam. This is similar to how we judge popularity of a person. When different people praise a person in the same way, it appears as if it is manipulated. If a person is praised in different words though they mean the same, then we can be certain that the praises are genuine. Similarly, a website can be said to more worthy if more and more people recommend it for seemingly different reasons and different patterns of same words. Such references carry more weight with Google ranking.

A similar grouping refers to the fact that a website which is referring to your site should be of similar to yours in nature. For example, if your site is about "Database Programming" the referring sites should be about the same topic or similar topics like "Databases" or "Programming".

When you form a relationship you would prefer to be with a more popular person. Similarly, try and get incoming links from sites which are better ranked than yours.

There are three types of links possible. One is an incoming link, next is a reciprocal link and another more common one is the outgoing link. The best one to have is the incoming link. The next one is reciprocal linking. It is a scheme in which you go around asking similar sites to provide an incoming link with an assurance that you will link to their site too. Outgoing link is a link which you provide in your site to another site. This can dilute the rank of your website, though there is no solid proof of this.

The best way to get more incoming links is to develop content. For instance, if you have a website about financial accounting, you should develop articles rich with content using this phrase in your website. You could talk about the financial accounting systems prevalent around the world, about the job trends in financial accounting, about the outsourcing phenomenon going on in the world like outsourcing of filing of Tax returns work to Bangalore, India and Dalion, China. These articles will be linked to by other sites and will make your site rank high in Google searches and ensure a high traffic.

Observe any of the top ranking sites you will see lots of content. Isn't it similar in our daily lives ? A person who is multi-talented is much loved and known in the society.

All humans want to be loved or feel wanted. Similarly, websites should be useful so that they can be popular, Google seems to say.

Copyright by VK Publishers. Emali [email protected], if you have any ideas or comments.