The graph below represents 8 sites that were linked to the most in the daily SearchCap between 8/2 and 8/22 at SearchEngineLand.com. Download the PDF for the top 54 sites.
If you look at SearchEngineLand as a niche human edited deep linking directory, and you were Google, you would give the pages it links to a boost similar to the boost given for being in the Yahoo Directory. Since Google can’t look at or read every page created, they have to rely on people from other websites linking to the pages that have “quality”. They have to Trust that SearchEngineLand isn’t giving preferential treatment to these 8 sites over the others and that they are actually of a higher quality than the other lesser linked to sites.
This is represented in greater detail in Hubs, Authorities, and Communities by Jon M. Kleinberg “First, they define the strength of the connection (link) from one journal (website) to another to be the percentage of the citations (links) in the first journal (website) that refer to the second. They then seek a set of weights (pagerank) that obey the following equilibrium: the weight of each journal J (mywebsite) should be equal to the sum of the weights (pagerank) of all journals citing J (linking to mywebsite), scaled by the strengths of their connections to it. Again, we can see desirable features of this definition; if a journal receives regular citations from other journals of large weight (pagerank), it too will acquire large weight (pagerank).”
