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).”
There are a lot of shallow, spammy, ugly websites out there… that’s what I learned. These sites aren’t created for people, they’re created to rank for a couple of keywords, just enough to get a little traffic, and then hope for someone to quickly click an ad on their navigationless single page site. I started to see things from Google’s perspective after looking at site after junky site. If I were to decide which sites were accepted by asking myself “Would I recommend this site to a friend”, not many would be. Actually, I would end up with a really bad neighborhood if I linked to every site that was submitted. In July, 60% of the traffic came from India which tells me a lot of people are paying to build links. For you directory submitters out there, I have a few tips from my experience on this end.
. Getting 100,000 people to your website in a day who could care less about SEO will just cost you money, not make it. So, where do these purpose fulfilling people hang out on the internet? What related interests do they have? What forums do they frequent, what social bookmarks do they use, what blogs do they read? If you get an attention grabbing, relevant ad in front of 100,000 qualified potential customers you’re doing a lot better than just “getting a lot of traffic”.
