Legal Linking Goodness

I just finished writing a rather long post at Threadwatch about the legality of linking. If you’re too lazy to read my rather encyclopedic rant, here is a two-point summary:

• A hyperlink is basically a reference. A reference, whether in your kid’s term paper or on your homepage, is (in and of itself) legal.
• Any reference, including a hyperlink, is bound by ‘normal’ laws which govern speech–e.g., you can’t slander someone, you can’t steal someone’s content, etc.

For a concise breakdown of what the average webmaster needs to know, I suggest Linking Legalities…What You Need to Know by Eric Ward.

Rotating Links

This thread at WMW caught my interest. The question: do rotating links help link popularity? Crush replies with what also happens to be my initial reaction.

Crush: works for now but I think SE’s are working towards killing rotating links. Like I say for now fine but may have less effect.

I’m not sure about this one though. LBB readers, tell me what you know!

Links from .edu’s

A question for our expert readers: What’s the skinny on .edu links?

My own opinion is that they probably are valued as more important than a “normal” .com, .org or .net link. It may be only a “weak” indicator of quality, but current algo’s seem to be using almost any quality indicator, however weak. That said, I am not sure if the boost is anything spectacular, however it may help a site gain authority in the eyes of a SE (or help it get out of the sandbox).

The question is asked in a WMW thread, Links from student edu pages:

willybfriendly: .edu links are nice, but don’t “rank” differently than any other link.

…

alphacooler: We DO KNOW that .edu links are weighted very heavily with the engines.

What’s the verdict?

Do Links from PDFs ‘Count’?

This is something I’ve wondered about before, but never pursued much: Do links from PDF’s count towards link popularity?

I can’t say that I know for certain. I do know that Google often caches an HTML version of a PDF document, converting URLs and links within to normal HTML links–so, my guess would be, that links from PDFs do count.

The question was asked at High Rankings in Worthy Links In Readable Documents, Links in PDF’s:

If a client produces numerous PDF Fact sheets that are available for download from their site will links to URLs in the PDF’s have any weight when it comes to link popularity?

xScottx replies with some good, hard evidence:

…when searching for backlinks in Google for some sites, PDFs sometimes show up….so it seems that the links in PDFs do count for link popularity.

And fathom seems to agree. Does anyone know for sure, either way? Feedback appreciated…

Dr. Garcia (Orion): “Link-based models have failed miserably”

Rand has posted an interview with Dr. Garcia (Orion) at SEOmoz. Dr. Garcia is ‘one of the SEO/M world’s foremost authorities on the subjects of the IR (Information Retrieval) field & search engine technology’. Definitely a good read… I found two parts to be especially interesting:

Rand: Are there any standout shifts you see towards greater or lesser use of things like PageRank, Trustrank, VIPS, Local Link Popularity, etc.?

Dr. Garcia: Link-based models have failed miserably. Some few âverticalsâ are using feedbacks and reviews to improve results using Slope One methods and item-to-item collaborative filtering (personalization based on recommendation). Iâm not sure if this technology is ready for general searches. A system based on item-to-item collaborative filtering and that considers usersâ actions as âreview votesâ can be gamed, without not even considering the standard issues (scalability, security, spam etc).

I do agree that link-based algo’s are not perfect, but I have to disagree that they have "failed miserably". For instance, take Google vs. MSN on relevancy. Why is there so much more spam is MSN? Because MSN’s link pop algo’s are so much easier to game. Google’s, on the other hand, are relatively elegant–this is a large part of what drives their relevancy.

Dr. Garcia’s comments on a "system based on item-to-item collaborative filtering" are pretty timely considering Yahoo’s recent release of MyWeb 2.0.

On the future of links in SEO:

Links will always be part of the âranking mixâ but not as much as many think. Contextual associations and semantics (meaning), on the other
hand, is a must for search engines that want to assess the sense of
documents.

I’ll have to take issue yet again. Certainly contextual associations (a la the Semantic Web) will improve search relevancy as they are better integrated. The truth however is that search engines are still extremely weak with this stuff, and, IMHO, the Semantic Web (or anything like it) is still decades away.

Meanwhile search engines will need to use off-site metadata as a heavy factor in their algo’s to stay relevant. And the truth is, there aren’t very many types of off-site metadata that are "universal" and also useful in a WWW search engine algo… besides links. After all, the hyperlink is the basis of the Web… both its format (HyperText Markup Language), and its protocol (HyperText Transfer Protocol).

Until we have a new "type" of World Wide Web, link building is here to stay as the main focus in SEO.