SES Conference Notes - part2

Search Engine Q & A on Links

Moderator:
Danny Sullivan, Founder, SearchEngineWatch.com

Speakers:
Kaushal Kurapati, Director Search Relevance, Ask.com
Ramez Naam, MSN Windows Live
Adam Lasnik, Google
Rjat Mukherjee, Yahoo!

This was a great session! First things first – Adam Lasnik with Google definitively answered the question on “How many links is optimum? His answer was 42. LOL

In Ramez Naam from MSN’s presentation he stated that links are for three things:

1. Discovery - what pages exist?

2. Reputation - how important is this page?

3. Annotation - what is this page about?

He said to make links useful to your users and to make them:

• Short & Readable
• Descriptive
• Useful for Navigating
• Placed in a useful location
• In a useful font, color, etc.

Ramez also stated that using “link building” methods that have worked in the past may not work 6 months from now. Hmmm, was that prophetic Ramez?

Kaushal Kurapati from Ask.com stated that links are not all equal. He advised to use caution relating to reciprocal links and buying links. We were told to avoid link farms, cloaking, invisible, or hidden text. His recommendation was to build great content and to syndicate it.

Adam Lasnik from Google said that all of the search engines are interested in having webmasters make links that are useful for their users. He stated what many of us have been saying for quite sometime that “It’s not a numbers game; It’s about making your links relevant. A garden site with links to mortgages is not relevant.” He also warned about having the same anchor text and descriptions on many sites. I believe the term he used was “sketchy”.

Rjat Mukherjee from Yahoo gave us a “7 Links for highly effective people” presentation. It was basically an advertisement for Yahoo’s product line. Here is a copy of the list:

ysearchblog.com
answers.yahoo.com
builder.search.yahoo.com
myweb.yahoo.com
siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
help.yahoo.com/search
search.yahoo.com

In the Q&A session we learned that:

It’s better to use a 301 instead of a 404 and we should use custom 404’s for errors. Also, 301’s do pass PR.

Danny Sullivan asked whether search engines are looking at a link to a page and the value of the page trust or are you looking at the whole domain and trust of the domain?

Rjat with Yahoo said there are other algorithms that tell you the trust of a site, not just links. They also do look at a site’s aggregate popularity.

Adam Lasnik with Google said it depends; sometimes it may be inappropriate to share the link love of a page and aggregate that across a whole domain. He states that it is probably clear in which times it is done.

Ramez Naam from MSN said ditto on Google. He said to look at Geocities as an example, “the domain as a whole doesn’t make sense.” Ramez said

Kaushal from Ask.com stated that they do have a domain level trust factor but it plays into a whole bunch of things and it doesn’t always come into play in rankings.

I asked the panel the very direct question on how they perceive the links pages and methods that most real estate agents are using, specifically the directories organized by state that have become so popular. I also asked whether or not these pages should be removed.

Adam Lasnik from Google said that there has been a lot of work done to determine the relevancy and purpose of the links. In my example, “If you feel those links will give your users a benefit because the link has more unique content…. If not, in the aggregate, then that is kinda junk.” He said that if you just built a bunch of pages that don’t contribute any useful content then they should be removed.

Ramez Naam with Yahoo said it is also an issue on how your pages rank. He said that if your site is about Florida and because of anchor text on your page it shows up in the results for Illinois then that’s not a relevant result for their users. (Ramez didn’t use those specific states - I just can’t remember which ones he used.) Perhaps this explains some of the real estate sites that have been recently nuked by Yahoo.

After the resoundingly negative feedback from the panel members concerning reciprocal links directories I decided to ask Matt Cutts for his authoritative response to this matter: he said “if it’s just a bunch of agents that link to each other and don’t know one another, delete them.”

Boys & Girls,

I think the message is clear, if your reason for exchanging links is for search engine rankings only, don’t be surprised if it backfires in the very near future.

I’ll have more notes from the other sessions about linking later. Stay tuned…