November 23, 2009

SEO Day 5: Google’s Rise: A Link is Worth 1,000 Words

Automated Content Creation Scares Google

Yesterday we covered on page optimization, and mentioned how some people are too aggressive with keyword density. Of course copy that is dense with keywords likely sounds dense, and will not convert site visitors into buyers. But some automated content generation programs create content that is better than some page copy that people write.

Some major corporations, like Thomson Financial, publicly admit that they generate news reports using robots to write the content.

Thomson Financial has been using automatic computer programs to generate news stories for almost six months. The machines can spit out wire-ready copy based on financial reports a mere 0.3 seconds after receiving the data. Thomson management likes its reporter robots so much that it has decided to expand the fleet.

The cost of creating content for the sake of it has dropped to ~ $0. In a market dominated by outsourcing and automated content generation, a search engine has to look beyond what we say about ourselves if they want to stay relevant.

Links as Votes

Part of what allowed Google to grow so influential so fast is that they use elegant link analysis in their relevancy algorithms.

Not all votes are counted equally. The more quality websites that link at a given website, the more that website is trusted when it links out to other websites. Google’s PageRank algorithm is designed such that links from the homepage of a leading university are trusted more than a link from a low quality website that links to other low quality websites.

In the image to the right, you can see that the top page passes 50 units of link weight, whereas the bottom page only passes 3 units of link weight. Both links are still worth getting, but the top one counts much more.

Link Anchor Text as a Relevancy Aid

If another site links to you saying that your site is about Chicago dentists then that link is interpreted as a vote of trust for your site in general, and it counts much more for the words in the link anchor text. Such a link would help you rank better for Chicago dentists and closely related topics.

Search Engines Follow People

Search engines only trust us if others trust us too. Search engines follow people.

Tomorrow we will cover an easy way to get great links.

Cheers,
Aaron Wall

101 Flavors of Search Spam

P. S. To appreciate all the different ways people try to spam Google, read this PDF created by Google’s Amit Singhal in 2004, paying particular attention to slides 15 through 26
http://www.research.ibm.com/haifa/Workshops/searchandcollaboration2004/papers/haifa.pdf
All these varieties of spam are precisely why search engines must place more weight on what others say about us than on what we say about ourselves.

Great Search Algorithm Research Papers

If you are the type of person who likes to read research papers you may want to read the following papers. Or if you don’t like algorithms, you can get the best parts of such research papers by joining our site and reading our reviews, and asking us any questions you have about these papers.