The Demise Of Linking ... And Its Effect On Google Pagerank
By Tom Foremski - October 2, 2009
Linking within online news articles seems to be at an all time low. Just take a look at Techmeme.
Initially, Techmeme's creator Gabe Rivera did a fantastic job with his algorithm. He was able to surface lots of interesting posts and also show who was linking to that post. Techmeme relied on links to find the best content.
But today, Techmeme relies on people, Megan McCarthy, and Twitter people (@atul) to find interesting posts because there are very few sites linking to other posts.
Looking at Techmeme today, there are many stories that have no links to them at all, or they are links from within their own sites. For example, a story on Sir Martin Sorrell (Sir Martin Sorrell: Rupert Murdoch's pay wall plan is right) from the Daily Telegraph shows one link, from a Daily Telegraph blog.
The demise of linking seems as if we have gone back to where things stood five years ago, when newspapers hated linking out to other news sites, or even acknowledging that other news sites existed.
Bloggers loved linking and many still do it -- but not as much, especially if they've transitioned into online news magazines such as GigaOm, or ReadWriteWeb, blogs only in name because they use blogging software (Wordpress) to publish but act like and look like the traditional old media.
This all has a more serious implication: Google PageRank. The whole bedrock of Google's search is in links. That was its founders' great insight: pages with more links to them are more important than those with fewer links. There is a PageRank patent.
Not everyone has reduced their linking. Spammers and publishers of commerce sites are continuing to use links a lot because that's what Google pays attention to in determining the quality of a page. This means that if non-spammers are linking less then Google's first page of results is going to get flooded by spam.
Maybe you are already noticing less relevance in Google results?
Will Google reward pages that have fewer links in them? Or will it penalize pages that have too many links to them because it's likely to be spam? It would seem Google must make these types of adjustments.
- - -
New Media Increasingly Looks Like Old Media Says Techmeme Founder
5yrs: Lessons and Insights: Where Have All The Blogs Gone? -
Learn to love your links - Newsvetter.
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Comments (6)
If Google does nothing and all the vain folks and business who rely on page one listings start slipping, they're going to have to start linking out again, which is a good thing for everyone. Google doesn't have to do a thing.
Posted: October 2, 2009 12:03 PM
In theory, links are weighted by authority. Links from older, well ranked sites count more than links from new, poorly ranked sites. I'd expect some deterioration in search relevance but not a scenario that has nothing but spam on the serp.
Posted: October 2, 2009 12:24 PM
Links from content might be down, but overall linking to content is way up, in the form of shorturls. I'm not sure about this, but short urls do not help PR at all because the link text and link location are both hidden. Look at mashable where each post gets tweeted hundreds of times, many by automatic software so the tweeter can get some benefit as being the first retweet... Seems a lot easier to write content with out links, then rely on Twitter, stumble, delicious, digg to get the links syndicated
Posted: October 2, 2009 1:26 PM
Personally, I think the problems for Google may run even deeper than you've alluded to Tom. PageRank, as you stated, is a weighting algorithm based on links as votes, where reputation is tracked and assigned at the URL/document level.
The current trend in online publishing however is towards increasing decentralization and syndication of content. At the same time, 'votes' are moving away from blogs and websites in favor of shortURL services, Twitter, and Social Media sites - many of which Google is banned from fully indexing.
I wrote an original analysis of the issue a few months ago titled "Docs are Old School, We Need PageRank for People" (http://www.bit.ly/128U9V) that attempts to address the issue and advocates a move to tracking reputation at the author/personal ID level.
Posted: October 2, 2009 1:42 PM
Good points. The links have moved to Twitter, Facebook and short urls. And thus Google has to keep tweaking its algorithm and also figure out how it will deal with places where Google cannot go. Increasingly there is more Internet that isn't Google friendly. Google's mission to index all of the world's content is becoming ever harder. Wait until the newspapers and magazine set up their own search site and GOOG isn't invited.
Posted: October 2, 2009 2:47 PM
I think another reason you're seeing fewer links these days is because more people are becoming aware that nofollow links are now linkjuice leaks.
Because nofollow links are now included in the denominator when determining how much linkjuice to pass on, many believe it is better not to link at all than it is to put a nofollow link.
Posted: October 3, 2009 7:46 AM