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7 Factors Google Uses To Evaluate Links For SEO
Inbound links are one of the most powerful assets in the world of online marketing. Every link pointing to your website passes authority to your site, making it more authoritative and trustworthy in Google’s eyes. The higher your website’s perceived authority, the higher it’s going to rank in searches, which means more traffic and brand visibility.
Thankfully, Google has safeguards in place to ensure that all links aren’t treated equally; that’s a good thing because it means you can’t spam links across the web to manipulate rankings without getting a Google penalty. Most of us can judge quickly whether a link is “natural” or whether it’s spam, but Google’s evaluation process is more nuanced than this.
So how, exactly, does Google evaluate links in its ranking algorithm? There are seven main factors:
1. Source Authority
As a general rule, the more authoritative the linking source domain is, the more authority the link is going to pass to the site it links to. For example, if a newly created site doesn’t have many readers and doesn’t have many links on its own, it’s going to be a low-authority site; any link you get from it will have marginal benefit at best.
But if you can get a link from an established, well-known online publication, such as The Huffington Post, you’ll get far more benefit from the link. Obviously, the more authoritative the link, the harder it is to acquire, so you’ll need to balance your efforts between those which are most rewarding and those that are actually available to you.
2. Nofollow
There is a specific exception to the authority rule: the nofollow tag. Google allows you to tag certain links in the HTML code with “rel=nofollow” to indicate that they shouldn’t be crawled, followed, or used as a means of passing authority.
It’s mostly used by publishers to ensure that their authority isn’t damaged by outbound links that lead to questionable sources; after all, links are something of a two-way street. You can also mark your own links with a nofollow tag if you want the link to exist without passing authority to other pages.
It’s commonly thought that if a link is marked with a nofollow tag, Google will ignore it. However, various studies have suggested that nofollow links aren’t always ignored by Google, and that having enough nofollow links may actually be crucial for good SEO.
3. Source Relevance
There’s also evidence to suggest that the relevance of your linking source also matters in Google’s evaluation. If you’re posting on a blog about making great hamburgers, and you link to a criminal defense lawyer’s page, there’d better be a good reason for it. If you’re linking to a site about how to source the best ingredients for your restaurant, it might make more sense.
Publishers that publish articles on a wide variety of topics often have category pages that segment these topics, and in such cases it’s important that the link resides on a page within the right topical category. The rule of thumb here is to make sure the link makes logical sense for your readers.
4. Contextual Relevance
The content surrounding your link is also important. Text before and after a link serves as contextual relevance for the destination page of the link, helping Google determine how the link relates to the content in which it’s placed. This effect is most prominent in the sentence in which the link resides, followed by the paragraph in which it resides, followed by the body of the entire article in which it resides.
Article source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2018/01/22/7-factors-google-uses-to-evaluate-links-for-seo/