SEO question

[gaydemon_jr]

Hehe, yes another one :)

I was wondering whether linking TO a relevent site actually helps your own ranking?

[MrJD]

to a certain extent... yes. It will help build "authority" and increase your pages overall relavancy

[gaydemon_jr]

Thanks. What is 'authority'?

[abostonboy]

Anthony,

It will help you come up in the search engines, but may or may not help you in PR. For example, I had an asian blog and wanted to get the keywords "Brandon Lee". I tried on my own. Finally, I did a couple of posts where I quoted part of a wiki article and linked to it. After that I got the keywords.

Authority means you know what you are talking about on a subject. For example, realclearpolitics.com Google considers an authority on the 2008 election. So, linking heavily to sites like that (if you have a political blog) will make Google feel you are an authority on that as well. That is of course, if you have the text to prove it.

[gaydemon_jr]

Oh I see, thanks Lloyd. It doesn't half get complicated haha.

[gaydemon]

Google assigns you a value for Authority, the higher it is the more important your site is within a certain field.

For example, Inland Revenue would be considered to have high authority for UK Taxation.

Authority can be manipulated or decided by how your site is linked to and from.

For example if a lot of Transsexual sites would be linking to gaydemon, then google would be likly to assume that Gaydemon is a authority site for Transsexual. (if the words and terms related to Transsexuals would be on the page)

It depends on a lot of factors though which very few if any outside google actually knows.

But its supposed to be driven by natural linking from other sites (natural linking, sort of means that people link to your site because they like it)






Thanks. What is 'authority'?

[rawTOP]

To look at it from the other perspective, linking to sites that don't have authority (without a nofollow) will make you look spammy. Who you link to is very important.

And even which page you link to on a site will be important. To extend Bjorn's example - if the transsexual site links to a transsexual topic page on Gay Demon it will be viewed as a better link than if they link to GayDemon's home page...