Moving To Trusted Links & Change The Link Election Model
Thank you, Aaron. That’s for taking the
research paper (PDF file) about detecting link spam that Gary
wrote about
earlier and breaking it
down in non technical language (and Jim Boykin summarizes Aaron further
here). Aaron finds things like the paper says having .edu and .gov links are
a good thing, don’t worry about having a few spammy links and the more trusted
links you have, the better.
I was thinking last night about the way to describe some of the changes or
generational evolution we’ve seeing with counting links, and I thought it might
be helpful to break it down this way:
Counting Links / Referendum: Before Google, other search engines made
use of links to determine which sites might be important. But this was mainly a
counting exercise. The more links the better, regardless of the quality of those
links.
Weighted Links / Electing A Congress: Google’s PageRank system helped
usher in a change to weighting links, that not all are as important as others.
The system worked to figure out what were the most important links and give
sites getting those links more credit — the authority pages, to use a popular
term for this.
Trusted Links / Qualifying Representatives
This is what we’ve been moving to. When PageRank knew a link was “important,”
that wasn’t the same as trustworthy despite the authority misnomer. It only
meant knowing that some particular link should count for more because the page
the link was on had a lot of people “voting” for it. You can scam that type of
voting.
That’s a rough idea, and I’m playing at refining it more, but I thought I’d
share it now. Remember, it’s also not just about how much a link counts for but
the text that’s in and surrounding the link, along with a lot of other factors.
Also see Yahoo My
Web: An eBay For Knowledge on how search engines hope to tap into trust in
ways beyond link analysis to improve results.