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Background
In this post, I explain why topically relevant links within the main content of a webpage are the most valuable links.
Once upon a time, Google was all about links, and nothing else.
Of course that was a few years ago and things have changed, but to understand why links matter to search rankings, it helps to understand how Google started with links, and nothing else.
The importance of links to Google’s search results
In the beginning, there was “backrub”
In this post I provide a terse summary of Google’s origin story. If you want more detail, read SEO: Link building, digital PR, and the Google origin story
Google started as a research project named Backrub.
A nerd (Larry Page) wanted to mathematically model how academic papers and citations (attributions) between academic papers are valued.
As the math was hard, even for a hard core nerd like him, he asked a nerd buddy of his (Sergey Brin) to help work out the math.
To test the model and the math, they needed sample data. They needed a collection of documents that cited each other.
As the world wide web was nothing but a collection of documents that cited each others, one of them (or maybe both) wrote software to crawl the web and build a database of links.
And the rest as they say, is history.
Building topically relevant links is hard. We make it easy.Getting lost in language
Google started by mathematically modeling citations between papers. What are sometimes also called attributions. On the world wide web, they’re called links.
But today, within the context of digital marketing, the terms “citation” and “attribution” have come to have different meanings.
Citations
In modern digital marketing speak, a citation refers to an online reference to a business that includes the business name, address, and phone number (NAPs). They are critically important for local SEO.
There are services you can subscribe to that ensure your various NAP citations in various directories (Yellow Pages, Yelp, etc) synchronize to help ensure it’s obvious each NAP citation refers to the same business.
Attributions
An attribution is now where a website visitor came from. Did they show up due to Organic Search, a Facebook post, a mention in a blog post by someone else, an email blast, an ad (if so, which one?), etc.
Marketing departments measure attributions in order to understand which digital marketing channels both bring bring users to the website, and bring users to the website who buy.
Topically relevant
And that means that links that would previously have been called “citations” or “attributions” need to be called something else.
Enter, stage left, “topically relevant links”.
While it doesn’t really roll of the tongue, it does accurately describe something that is important to SEO and search rankings.
Not all links have value
In the beginning, the “structure” of the world wide web was nothing more than links between webpages.
A link was a link, period.
But due to people working to “game the system”, there quickly emerged an “arms race” between Google and SEOs.
SEOs would take advantage of any tricks they found that helped their sites rank higher.
And Google continuously updates their search algorithm to render these tricks ineffective.
And today, not only do not all links have equivalent value, not all links have value. Some links even have negative value.
Which links have the highest value. and why?
But topically relevant links in the webpage main content do
What “main content” means
There are various parts to a webpage. There is the blog post or article itself, the header, the footer, maybe a sidebar, maybe banner ads, maybe a “related posts” section at the bottom, maybe other stuff.
The main content is the blog post or article. Everything else is supplementary content. Per Google.
What “topically relevant” means
Literally means the link is topically relevant and provides value to the reader. If the article is about surf boards, a link to a webpage about surfboard maintenance is topically relevant. A link to a webpage about motorcycle maintenance is not.
Again, per Google
The document in which Google makes these assertions is the Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines.
This document provides the most complete definition of what Google means when they say “high quality content”.
In Closing
The highest value links that exist are topically relevant links from the main content of a webpage.
Again, per Google.
Building topically relevant links is hard. We make it easy.