Blog Post 2: Search Engine Optimization
Jack Evitts
Networks
10/24/16
Blog Post 2
Link to source: http://www.stamfordadvocate.com/news/article/What-Google-Doesn-t-Want-You-to-Hear-About-10162311.php
The article that I chose for the second blog post, is titled “What Google Doesn’t Want You to Hear About Link-Building for SEO.” The author, Jayson DeMers, approaches a problem that many websites have, boosting their rankings on Google’s search engine. DeMers discusses two factors that contribute to how a page is ranked. The first is relevance. Relevance deals with the content being sought in a query. Websites that contain the content sought for in a search are added to the list of page links compiled by Google. Then, Google ranks the pages based on domain and page authority. DeMers describes domain authority as being, “a relative measure, on a scale of 0-100, of how likely an entire website is to rank well in search engine,” and page authority as, “the likelihood of any individual page of ranking in search engines.” The importance of authority stems from the idea that a webpage with many links pointing towards it, must be important in respect to the content displayed on the site. So to build authority, and increase the likelihood of a webpage showing up first on a search engine, websites need to acquire inbound links from many sources. The key is that where the links come from matter. Links from webpages that already have high authority pass on that authority to the site that they are directing a link towards.
The part of DeMers’ article that deals with authority is like what we have learned about PageRank. Page and Domain authority both increase when a website’s link is shared on another website of high authority, the same way that PageRank gave higher rankings to nodes connected to sources that pointed towards a great number of other nodes. PageRank combines both authority and relevance by assuming that webpages that point towards many other webpages are important. So, to grow a website’s importance, links pointing from other sites towards a website must exist. DeMers then describes how Google encourages natural link growth by penalizing websites that attempt to spam their link on other websites of importance, or who pay to have other websites point towards them. Such practices as leaving links in comments on webpages and paying website to feature a webpage link are deemed manipulative and are weeded out by Google’s Penguin algorithm designed to prevent such inorganic webpage growth. Without a system to regulate links to other webpages, the strength of search results would diminish as webpages all sought to increase their authority unnaturally. By having a penalty in place to punish those that break Google’s terms and conditions on linking, the search engine becomes more reliable as the sites with the most authority deserve to have that much authority.