Idealistic vs. Real Link Structure
What does a search engine ‘expect’ to see?
The clues that the various engines use all obviously differ, but there are several common elements:
- Critical Mass of Domain Links – The number and quality of links pointing at your domain is certainly critical.
- Well designed internal page structure, with appropriately defined tags. The Title tags, H1 tags, etc… are obviously the basics – but obviously on-page optimization matters.
- They expect to see links from third party sites to deep link into your site and to use correct anchor text as opposed to ‘your company name’ or ‘click here.’
Real life linking patterns
In practice however, almost all non ‘publisher’ or content domains have the vast majority of links pointing squarely at the home page. The result? What we call ‘Bottled Domain Authority’. This occurs most often on large, well known websites that have hundreds of thousands of links pointing at their domain, and who will rank well for whatever keywords they ‘optimize’ for on their homepage. Because of their varied categories of products or services , however, that authority of links is diluted – and links from varied kinds of content confuse the search engine.
This imbalance in link focus opens the door for what we call ‘internet pollution’ – the affiliates and aggregators who abuse SEO tactics at the expense of the searcher’s user experience. Our Conductor Link Solution specifically combats this ‘search spam’ and allows industry leading brands to rank for the terms which they should.
So when is a linking solution appropriate?
