~~~High Search Engine Rankings~~~
From: Hari Shankar
As far as Google goes, it purely does ranking on quality links that a
site has - according to what I've read. So in order to get a good
ranking in Google or any SE that gives importance to the above factor,
are there any pointers to how many links one should have for a good
position?
And one more query is - why do different SEs give different numbers of
the no. of links pointing to a site? (e.g. Lycos says 2000 odd links
whereas
Infoseek says 900 links.)
Best regards
C.Hari Shankar
Assistant Manager - Marketing
www.ciol.com - The ultimate IT destination
~~~Jill's Response~~~
Hari,
Good questions, which I'm sure many people have often wondered about.
As far as Google is concerned, you are misinformed about it ranking
sites *purely* based on quality links that a site may have. Google
does apparently look at what other quality sites may be linking to
yours, but this is only one small factor in how it determines the
ranking of any given site. Many sites do not lend themselves to being
linked externally by lots of other sites, and Google still ranks them
highly. Nearly all of the sites that I have gotten high rankings for
in Google, do not have many (if any) sites that point to them. They
do very often have high rankings in the other search engines and
directories, however, which may certainly help boost the Google
ranking. In other words, having lots of free for all sites or other
sites with info that's irrelevant to your site, probably will NOT
boost your ranking with Google. Having a good ranking with Yahoo, LookSmart or DMOZ, however, *may* boost the rankings slightly. More importantly (broken record time) is good quality keyword-rich text on each and every page of the actual site.
As to your second question, why different engines show a different
number of links pointing to your site...why that's simple! Each
engine can only tell you about the sites that they are aware of,
meaning the sites they have in their database. Remember, when someone
does a search in an engine, the engine is not searching the entire
Internet to find appropriate sites. It's only searching through it's
known database of sites that its spider has crawled.
Each engine has a varying number of websites in its database. When
you ask it how many links are pointing to your site, it searches
through its database of known sites and tells you how many
have a link to yours. Therefore, the discrepancy between Lycos and
Infoseek is simply due to each of those engines having a varying
number of sites indexed. In your case, it appears that Lycos is
indexing many more sites that link to you, then Infoseek is indexing.
Which brings me to one more point about so-called link popularity. If
you are concerned about link popularity (and I wouldn't be too
concerned), then remember if another site is linking to your site, but
is not in a search engine's database, it won't count toward your link
popularity. You might want to submit the actual pages that are
linking to your site check first to see if they are indexed, along
with submitting your own pages to the engines.
- Jill
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