Link Popularity vs. Domain Popularity
Rumor has it link popularity is losing ground to domain popularity in the world of SEO, at least where Google is concerned. The online buzz says that Google has made some changes to its algorithms to counter link spamming so backlinks to your blog are only counted once per site versus every time there is a backlink throughout an entire site. What do you think? Good or bad? True or false?
In the meantime, if you want to check your domain popularity (and play with some other cool SEO tracking tools), LinkVendor has a domain popularity checker that seems to be accurate. Warning: if your blog is new, these tools might be depressing, but it is fun to check the stats for some popular sites or blogs that inspire you to see what they’re doing that you can try to emulate in order to achieve similar success.
Andy MacDonald | March 4th, 2008 at 1:44 pm #
Well, in principle this theory is certainly possible, and knowing Google, it wouldn’t surprise me if they had done something like this, however i think back links are always going to play a huge part in how well your site does. Even if Google doesn’t rely on back links anymore, the other search engines certainly does, and whats-more, PEOPLE find your site via links on other sites so its important that link building is not ruled out of your marketing plans.
Susan Gunelius (Post Author) | March 4th, 2008 at 5:54 pm #
Absolutely true, Andy. The other search engines still use backlinks, so I’m glad you pointed out that it’s still an important part of a blog’s marketing plan. Also, the social aspect of backlinking is an essential part of a blog’s success within the social web, so linking has much more value than simple Google search rankings. Thanks for mentioning that so I could clarify.
TzuVelli | March 5th, 2008 at 1:41 pm #
The only drawback to this is that Google ranks a site on a per page basis. In other words, each page has its own rank. Ignoring all but one link to a website or blog would degrade SERP responses significantly. Going to a single domain single link calculation would require them to change their formula significantly. I don’t think they will make such a significant change in their formula. That is, unless they have something to replace the value of links.
Trent | March 11th, 2008 at 11:41 am #
It seems like the more google tries to fight spammers, the more irrelevant their search results are. Has anyone else noticed that finding stuff through google has become much more difficult lately? Since wikipedia is usually one of the top results anyway, I find myself starting searches there just as much as google.
Susan Gunelius (Post Author) | March 12th, 2008 at 4:03 pm #
I’ve actually been reading a lot this week about Google’s “rumored” changes to its algorithms. I worked as a Quality Rater for Google for awhile (rating the quality of query results), and I wouldn’t be surprised by any changes Google suddenly makes. I guess we’ll have to wait and see what happens in terms of daily use to see which rumors are true and which are false. The mystery of Google continues…..
Chris Lang | June 17th, 2008 at 8:03 am #
I can tell you that Technorati only finds links to blogs from blogs on a one per blog basis. Google may be following suit since social bookmarking sites can be used for spam. Also it now takes about 50+ Diggs on Digg to be seen as a valuable link and more often lately the actual social bookmarking post is showing up in Google results.
Also many blogs are using DoFollow plugins in their comments and it has become popular to find these dofollow blogs and spam them.
I would love any further clarification you have on this and I am going to follow this thread. But I do have some questions…..
How do links in others blog posts to my blog posts look to Google? Blogs linking to blogs in the post body are supposedly seen as more valuable. At least in Blogsearch.
I feel that when keywords in linktext to my blog, that are within the keyword theme (post title) of the linking blog, they are found more valuable to Google. Both to the linking blog and mine. Does that make sense and do you feel it is true?
Also linking up to a better blog is considered a positive indicator to Google. True?
Do you think that Google will continue to find social bookmarking posts as positive indicators especially when they are highly voted on, (like Diggs of 200+) or will they soon downgrade these incoming links? I think they will continue but will soon want more positive votes.
While it does mention the RSS subscriber popularity (quantity) of a blog in the Blogsearch patent as a positive indicator, has anyone seen a rise in rankings when they added a couple thousand more readers? Remember that Google reader has a 40% dominance and they own FeedBurner so they know how many RSS subscribers we have and how many read the feed.
Lastly, would you rather have a link to the domain or a link to a specific blog post and any more light you can shed as to why would be appreciated.
Thanks, Chris Lang