Google’s Big Daddy reshuffle and recent changes in the way the company selects and ranks Web pages have caused confusion and despair among webmasters. Pandia takes a look at the effect links have on search engine ranking.

Planet Ocean’s Search Engine News newsletter has a useful summary of the latest Google ranking and web page selection changes in its recent issue (subscription required).

The newsletter notes that a large number of web sites have seen their pages plummet in the rankings or disappear altogether from Google’s index. As Planet Ocean explains this is partly caused by technical difficulties. However, as they point out:

The second, and far more important factor, is a substantially new paradigm in the way Google looks at linking relationships and the quality of your incoming and outgoing links.

Search engine democracy and link spamming

Google has always taken the number and quality of inbound links into consideration. This is a model taken from science: The number of quotations of peer review articles is taken as a sign of the quality of — and trust in — those articles.

Google, however, is facing a large number of creative search engine optimization experts that are trying to manipulate this “democracy” by generating a large number of “unnatural” inbound links.

They swap links with other webmasters, they buy links, they set up a large number of interconnected sites etc. The extent of this activity is now such that Google no longer can trust the votes of the webmasters.

In short: Google is trying to detect artificial link building and punish sites involved in this kind of activity and boost the rankings of sites with a large number of “natural” inbound links.

It is all a matter of trust. Google needs users to find useful, relevant, high quality information. Happy users come back and are much more likely to trust Google, and thereby also its text ads. And that’s where the money is.

Low quality sites that have gained a high position by “irregular” means are therefore a threat to Google.

Natural and unnatural links

How do they distinguish between natural and unnatural links? Now, that is a good question that only Google knows the answer to.

However, it is not hard to guess some of the factors involved:

1. if you have a large number of inbound links from so-called link farms, i.e. sites set up solely to swap links, that is a dead giveaway. Avoid “bad neighborhoods”.
2. If you get a large number of inbound links from sites that are irrelevant to your topic, that is a warning sign.
3. If Pandia started including a large number of links to gambling sites and pharmaceutical companies on our home page, we would be in trouble.
4. If Google detects a pattern of a group of sites interconnecting (”mini-nets”), without getting additional links from sites outside the group, that might trigger a penalty.
5. If Google detects that for every one of your inbound links you have a reciprocal link to the sites in questions, Google may start to wonder.
6. A sudden, dramatic, increase in the number of links to a relatively new site is suspicious.

Google’s Matt Cutts gives some examples on his site. He names sites selling links to mortgages sites, credit card sites, exercise equipment sites, and more:

“If you were getting crawled more before and you’re trading a bunch of reciprocal links, don’t be surprised if the new crawler has different crawl priorities and doesn’t crawl as much.”

What’s that supposed to mean? It means that Google has lost trust in this site. Even if Google will not drop the site entirely from its index, it may reduce the number of pages included in the index, it may reduce its ranking and it will — as Cutts points out — reduced the frequency with which it visits the site.

This means that new pages will not be included on a regular basis, which is bad news for both commercial sites and sited relying on news and fresh content.

Good links

So how do you identify links of the kosher kind?

1. Unsolicited links from respected sites are good. This applies to links from popular and respected blogs and news columns, but also from resource collections administered by — for instance — universities and government agencies (.edu and .gov domains in the US).
2. Links from white-listed sites — i.e. websites that the search engines have determined are trustworthy and non-spammy — help.
3. A large variety in the link text of inbound links is a sign of natural linking.
4. Having links to a large number of web pages on your site is a good thing. If all links go to your home page, that might be taken as a sign of manipulation. At least it gives the impression that people do not find your articles and resource collections very interesting. This is why blogs are so efficient. A good blog will attract other bloggers, securing a steady stream of inbound links to a large number of posts and articles.
5. References to your pages in services like digg.com, del.icio.us and Bloglines will help.
6. Links from trusted directories like the Open Directory continue to work.

Getting links without asking for them

How do you encourage people to link to you without asking them?

Now that is not too difficult to answer. The answer is found in the following formula: Quality + Quantity = Unsolicited Links..

Turn your site into an authoritative site:

1. Add a large number of useful (and original) articles.
2. Add a blog that is updated at least a couple of times a week.
3. Add useful resource pages with links to sites and articles of relevance to your topic, i.e. be generous with outbound links. People may leave your site via those links, but they are bound to come back for more.
4. Add a glossary, dictionary or a wiki with good explanations and relevant outbound links.
5. Add a discussion forum (if you have the time to moderate it)
6. Give away something for free: software, tutorials, white papers.

(This bulleted list explains why so many webmasters try to spam the search engines. Building a high quality authoritative site is hard work!)

Note also that the more pages a site has, the more likely it is that someone will find it using search engines. People use a large number of keyword combinations when searching for information. It is extremely hard to rank well for the most popular ones, but the rest may also generate a lot of traffic.

Should we stop swapping links?

For Google it would probably help a lot if webmasters stopped swapping links altogether. But we are not going to do that, not at least because we need inbound links to generate traffic as well.

Moreover, relevant inbound links help the search engines determine what pages are about, regardless of whether they are solicited or not.

Furthermore, Google will never be able to determine what is a reciprocal link precicely. For instance: The search oriented sites on the Web interlink all the time, and Google cannot punish Pandia for linking to other weblogs, even if they link back, because this is what blogging is all about.

At Pandia we get a large number of link requests every month. Most of them are of a spammy nature, mass-generated emails offering us a link in a new directory or link page in return for a link to their site. We ignore those.

However, sometimes we get a mail from — for example — a blogger that has established a well written search engine blog we haven’t heard of. If this is the case we will include a link at Pandia, because you, our reader, may find it useful.

We never require a link back, but somehow they never fail to give us one. It is polite to do so. This is what we do! And Google cannot and will not punish us for it.

Nor should the search engines, in our opinion, try to stop websites from selling text ads, even if this means a transfer of PageRank (”link popularity”). After all, we have to pay the bills, and Google is the biggest text ad generator of them all.

That being said, we do believe that Google does, or may do, reduce the effect of pages containing a large number of text ads, especially to non-related sites. You can stop this from happening by including a nofollow tag. Your advertisers won’t like it though.

So, to conclude: If a majority of your inbound links are natural, you will probably be safe. If you want to go out to get more links, make sure they are from legitimate sites and avoid links from (and to) sites that are of no relevance to your topic.

See also: The Pandia Search Engine Marketing 101 tutorial (which is, of course, another example of content attracting visitors and links!)