The success of your website in search engine rankings will really depend on several factors that affect links that link to your site. As we all know, Google has been interpreting links as votes of confidence by the source of target, with each individual vote being valued equally. Thus, when pages receive more votes via more incoming links, those pages become more important from the perspective of search engines. This measure of a page’s importance or relevance in the search portal is the PageRank.
The search engine optimization process is focused on scrutinizing several factors that influence the importance a link might carry. These factors include anchor texts, trust, authorities, and topic modeling. However, with the playing field becoming more and more competitive, applying these elements will not suffice. It is important to learn the following principles of link valuation that are tried and tested by SEOs to maximize the effectiveness of your link building efforts.
1. Higher up Links
Higher up links in HTML code of a page carry more relevant weight and cast more powerful votes than the lower ones. This means that they can pass more ranking value to your pages. Higher up links can also overpower on-page factors. For instance, having your relevant keywords at your title element can enhance your rankings. But, this principle states that being a higher up link outweighs the importance of your keywords, thus making your pages even more relevant.
2. External Links
External links are more influential than internal links. This does not mean that your internal links and proper site structure are useless when it comes to enhancing your site’s importance. It is just that external links have a more profound effect on your PageRank values.
3. Unique Domains and Domain Diversity
You also have to take note of the importance of greater domain diversity amongst your external links in their ranking algorithms. The more domains pointing to a specific page, the better. This is far more effective than just sourcing a lot from a previously linked site. This principle suggests that sourcing 10 links from 10 different domains is always better than having 100 links from a single site previously linked to you.
4. Trusted Sites
Links from trusted sites are always dependable since the pass more link value than obscure ones. Highly trusted domains always pass more relevance and more powerful votes of confidence since they already have established legitimacy.
5. Links inside Content
Links located inside unique page content pass more link value than from those located in footers, sidebar or from any form of site navigation. Links located in site navigations are outside the main page content that are considered less contextually useful, thus carrying less relevance.
6. Link Text
Anchor texts or keywords carried through HTML text pass more link value than those from alt attribute in link images. This principle does not say that you should completely opt out from using images or badges as links; search engines just prefer text equivalents.
7. More Valuable Domains
In general, trust plays a big role in site relevance and search engine rankings. Convention states that links from more valuable domains, specifically from important, popular, and trusted sites, pass more link value. However, there are a lot of cases that one can benefit from less important pages. This is because of the difficulty of the acquisition and of the metrics passed from valuable domains.
8. NoScript Tags
Links located within NoScript tags pass less link value or rank boost, if not none. This is because NoScript tags make links within the page that are invisible to your visitors.
9. Burst of New Links
A fresh burst of links may help content outrank technically stronger competitors. If a page collects a large volume of new links within a short span of time, search engines may interpret that your page is a new and highly beneficial or interesting resource. Having these will certainly help boost your search engine rankings.
10. Spam Links
Spam links may hurt the ability of the page to pass relevant link value. Having spam within your content or links will definitely hurt your search engine rankings. Also, high volumes of poison keywords or overly commercial anchor texts will lower your page’s ability to perform well in search engines and the passed link value.
