tar729
Regular Member
- Jun 27, 2016
- 265
- 223
Glossary:
Before we get into this subject I feel that some terms need to be explained because they might be new to some people. Below is the small glossary of terms to help you understand what I’m talking about:
· Donor = a page linking out to another page
· Receiver = a page the donor is linking out to
· Semantic relevance = topical relevance i.e if donor page is talking about dog food and receiver is about food for small dogs those pages with have high semantic relevance
· Semantic core = collection of key terms with close logical connection to the main search term, arranged by logical relevancy and not by search volume
N.B. Semantic core is a very complex subject. I will put together another article where I will explain this concept in great detail.
Why PR is dead?
Google said that it discontinued PageRank because “PR no longer reflects the algorithm accurately”. That is true but there is a lot more to it.
PR, as a metric, does not reflect the overall quality of a page but only indicates the quality based on incoming links and the traffic the page generates. Of course, the formula became more complex. Over time, Google attempted to take into account not only the quantity of incoming links but also their quality, by analysing the pages where the links came from. Nevertheless, when analysing the quality of pages and outgoing links they never considered semantic relevance of the donor paged to the receiver or anchor text.
This approach was flawed and became of this started to affect the quality of SERP results. Web masters would concentrate on PR alone when selecting possible link building targets, mistakenly thinking that the higher the PageRank, the more powerful the link from that page.
What is link relevancy?
Even now very few people within SEO community assess the quality of the link based on how relevant the anchor is to the content on the donor page. For most this is still a secondary factor at best. Of course, every SEO specialist does his best to acquire a relevant link but the human view of the relevancy is very different from algorithmic view.
One of the ways to test the relevancy of the page to a specific key phrase is to run a “site” operator in google. For example, you would type “site:yourdomain.com dog food” to see if there are any page on your site relevant to keyword “dog food”. Google will return result in the order of most relevant (in their opinion). If your landing page for “dog food” is no. 1, it means Google sees it as the most relevant on yourdomain.com. If on the other hand, your target page is buried within other pages on yourdomain.com, that means that Google does not see your target page as the most relevant. Building a link with anchor “dog food” will not have the maximum effect and might even be considered as spam.
Eventually, it became clear that PageRank as a metric became detrimental to the entire search engine because it misled SEO specialists and encouraged non-relevant linking between sites. This, in turn affected the quality of SERPs and the user experience. As a result, the decision was made to remove PageRank as a factor in decision making process when considering your link building strategy. However…
DA/PA or TF/CF?
Due to the secretive nature of Google and other search engines and the lack of understanding of fundamentals of search algorithm by the public, many myths and legends were created within SEO industry.
Removal of PR created a void, but where there is a demand there will always be supply. Third party companies such as Moz and Majestic have stepped in with their own, in-house metrics such DA/PA and TF/CF. Being not associated with Google or any other search engines these metrics are no doubt less accurate than the original PR. Most importantly, however, while accessing the quality of the link, just like PR, they don’t take into account the relevance of the donor, receiver and the anchor text.
It must be said at this point, that Majestic must have understood the flaws of their metrics and have been making some attempts to deal with this issue. As a result, they recently introduced a “topical trust flow” which is available to their paid subscribers. This metric attempts to analyse the semantic core of the domain and the donor and assigns a category such as Arts, News, Science, Shopping etc. This is clearly a step in the right direction.
What does this all mean?
Can DA/PA and TF/CF still be used while choosing potential link building targets? Of course they can but only as initial filters to find quality sites. To maximise the effect of the link the semantic core of the potential targets needs to be analysed to determine the key word/phrase relevancy of the donor to the anchor text and the receiver. Only then such link can be considered as truly relevant and useful for the user, which in turn will be greatly rewarded by the search engine in terms of ranking.
It’s important to stress that quality and weight of a link as viewed by Google, Bing, Yandex and other search engines is the factor of usefulness and relevancy for the person following that link. It is this factor that is measured within SE algorithm and gets assigned a numerical value. And it is this factor that directly relates to the position of the site within SERPs for your targeted key phrase.
Most importantly, a quality link will deliver improvements in SERPs not only for the key phrase in the anchor text but also for the entire group of logically related key phrases. The key phrases within the group are those phrases that statistically are used most often on the web together or in combination with the phrase in the anchor.
Key term groups in search engines
Different search engines have different amounts of phrases in associated groups. For example, in Yandex this number is almost 3 times higher than in Google Russia for commercial intent phrases. This is due to lack of understanding of Russian market and inability to create logical connections with all relevant phrases partially because of lack of statistical data. In Google Russia a number of phrases within a group for medium search volume phrases is about 6-7.
As English is a native language for Google in USA/UK a number of related phrased in a group is substantially greater. This number slowly increases for the higher search volume key terms. This is why an improvement in ranking for high search volume key terms will also bring about improvement for a lot of medium volume search terms. Therefore, high quality links should have high search volume key phrases as anchors because they will have accumulative effect for an entire group of 15-20 phrases. But many experienced SEOs already know that and have been using this knowledge for some time.
Part 2 will follow shortly:
Before we get into this subject I feel that some terms need to be explained because they might be new to some people. Below is the small glossary of terms to help you understand what I’m talking about:
· Donor = a page linking out to another page
· Receiver = a page the donor is linking out to
· Semantic relevance = topical relevance i.e if donor page is talking about dog food and receiver is about food for small dogs those pages with have high semantic relevance
· Semantic core = collection of key terms with close logical connection to the main search term, arranged by logical relevancy and not by search volume
N.B. Semantic core is a very complex subject. I will put together another article where I will explain this concept in great detail.
Why PR is dead?
Google said that it discontinued PageRank because “PR no longer reflects the algorithm accurately”. That is true but there is a lot more to it.
PR, as a metric, does not reflect the overall quality of a page but only indicates the quality based on incoming links and the traffic the page generates. Of course, the formula became more complex. Over time, Google attempted to take into account not only the quantity of incoming links but also their quality, by analysing the pages where the links came from. Nevertheless, when analysing the quality of pages and outgoing links they never considered semantic relevance of the donor paged to the receiver or anchor text.
This approach was flawed and became of this started to affect the quality of SERP results. Web masters would concentrate on PR alone when selecting possible link building targets, mistakenly thinking that the higher the PageRank, the more powerful the link from that page.
What is link relevancy?
Even now very few people within SEO community assess the quality of the link based on how relevant the anchor is to the content on the donor page. For most this is still a secondary factor at best. Of course, every SEO specialist does his best to acquire a relevant link but the human view of the relevancy is very different from algorithmic view.
One of the ways to test the relevancy of the page to a specific key phrase is to run a “site” operator in google. For example, you would type “site:yourdomain.com dog food” to see if there are any page on your site relevant to keyword “dog food”. Google will return result in the order of most relevant (in their opinion). If your landing page for “dog food” is no. 1, it means Google sees it as the most relevant on yourdomain.com. If on the other hand, your target page is buried within other pages on yourdomain.com, that means that Google does not see your target page as the most relevant. Building a link with anchor “dog food” will not have the maximum effect and might even be considered as spam.
Eventually, it became clear that PageRank as a metric became detrimental to the entire search engine because it misled SEO specialists and encouraged non-relevant linking between sites. This, in turn affected the quality of SERPs and the user experience. As a result, the decision was made to remove PageRank as a factor in decision making process when considering your link building strategy. However…
DA/PA or TF/CF?
Due to the secretive nature of Google and other search engines and the lack of understanding of fundamentals of search algorithm by the public, many myths and legends were created within SEO industry.
Removal of PR created a void, but where there is a demand there will always be supply. Third party companies such as Moz and Majestic have stepped in with their own, in-house metrics such DA/PA and TF/CF. Being not associated with Google or any other search engines these metrics are no doubt less accurate than the original PR. Most importantly, however, while accessing the quality of the link, just like PR, they don’t take into account the relevance of the donor, receiver and the anchor text.
It must be said at this point, that Majestic must have understood the flaws of their metrics and have been making some attempts to deal with this issue. As a result, they recently introduced a “topical trust flow” which is available to their paid subscribers. This metric attempts to analyse the semantic core of the domain and the donor and assigns a category such as Arts, News, Science, Shopping etc. This is clearly a step in the right direction.
What does this all mean?
Can DA/PA and TF/CF still be used while choosing potential link building targets? Of course they can but only as initial filters to find quality sites. To maximise the effect of the link the semantic core of the potential targets needs to be analysed to determine the key word/phrase relevancy of the donor to the anchor text and the receiver. Only then such link can be considered as truly relevant and useful for the user, which in turn will be greatly rewarded by the search engine in terms of ranking.
It’s important to stress that quality and weight of a link as viewed by Google, Bing, Yandex and other search engines is the factor of usefulness and relevancy for the person following that link. It is this factor that is measured within SE algorithm and gets assigned a numerical value. And it is this factor that directly relates to the position of the site within SERPs for your targeted key phrase.
Most importantly, a quality link will deliver improvements in SERPs not only for the key phrase in the anchor text but also for the entire group of logically related key phrases. The key phrases within the group are those phrases that statistically are used most often on the web together or in combination with the phrase in the anchor.
Key term groups in search engines
Different search engines have different amounts of phrases in associated groups. For example, in Yandex this number is almost 3 times higher than in Google Russia for commercial intent phrases. This is due to lack of understanding of Russian market and inability to create logical connections with all relevant phrases partially because of lack of statistical data. In Google Russia a number of phrases within a group for medium search volume phrases is about 6-7.
As English is a native language for Google in USA/UK a number of related phrased in a group is substantially greater. This number slowly increases for the higher search volume key terms. This is why an improvement in ranking for high search volume key terms will also bring about improvement for a lot of medium volume search terms. Therefore, high quality links should have high search volume key phrases as anchors because they will have accumulative effect for an entire group of 15-20 phrases. But many experienced SEOs already know that and have been using this knowledge for some time.
Part 2 will follow shortly:
