As one of Google’s most important ranking signals, links have seen a huge number of changes in how they are viewed and how they apply. As an industry, we have been encouraged to learn that the power of links as a signal has decreased in favour of other metrics, but is that actually the case? Paul, with access to the link profiles of thousands of sites and literally billions of links, takes us through the arguments for how we should really view our links in 2017 and beyond.
3. • 1997
Started as a web designer
• 2006
Moved through to the darker parts of
the web
• 2010
Transitioned to affiliate marketing
• 2011
Grew into a link building agency
• 2012
Helped found Kerboo
10. • At Kerboo our team has scored more than 8
billion links for their LinkRisk
• We have helped thousands of sites
understand and solve their link related issues
• We have the biggest disavow database
outside of Google
28. The PageRank (x) of the
linking page is shared
across the number of links
on that page
0.85 represents a
dampening factor to allow
PageRank to decay and
represent the likelihood
that a human user may
stop clicking
29. For years links and their PageRank
dominated how rankings were
calculated
103. ITS GOING TO BE A CONSTANT
PROBLEM TO BE AWARE OF
104. • Penguin 4 operates at page level
• It removes the ability for problematic links to
pass their value
• By removing that equity the ranking signals
for the page are reduced
107. • It relies on the bad links being assessed
during Google’s crawl
• And that will have taken some time to
complete and each change they make will
take a while to apply
132. We have a unique set of
modifiers for that value
133. Caveat
This is an attempt to
derive a link equity value
and doesn’t take into
account all the other
factors that could cause
a page to succeed or fail
135. I asked people to vote on what links they
thought were ‘best for SEO’ in a profile
I then ran our new link value metric
It made me think about the value we have
been chasing
139. • Massive site with lots of equity
• Most pages share their own equity across LOTS of
links out from the page
• The nature and pace of content being published to
the site means that equity gets buried very quickly
140. • Big, well trusted site
• Pages have fewer outbound links
• Structure of the site remains fairly consistent so
equity continues to flow down from the root
141. At least have one eye on the
equity a link may pass if its
trusted
157. • Accept that many of your links may no
longer pass value
• Avoid ANYTHING that could demonstrate
intent
• Remove or correct any blatant intent in your
profile
• Make sure you maintain a clean and
relevant link profile
158. • Keep one eye on how link equity passes
• Aim for links from trusted sites that are
relevant and will always pass value
• Make sure you know every link that you get