Link building has always been a relevant factor in improving a website's visibility and a key piece in how a site ranks, but in recent years several voices have played down the impact of links on the performance of an SEO strategy.
Recently, a leak of the Google Content Warehouse API revealed some very interesting details about how the search engine handles links, which we're going to go through below.
Let's look at the most important points related to link building that this leak has brought to light.
Interesting link building parameters in the Google Leak
Anchor text (AnchorsAnchor):
- text: The words in the anchor text are Google's strongest signal about the topic of the linked content.
- origText: The original form of the anchor text, including capitalization and punctuation, helps Google understand the intent of the link and how natural it is.
- context2: The context surrounding the link, including nearby words, provides additional information about its relevance and meaning.
Link quality (AnchorsAnchor):
- sourceType: The quality of the source page is essential. Google trusts links from high-quality websites (main index) more.
- pagerankWeight: PageRank, although not publicly visible, is still a key metric for Google. Links from websites with a high PageRank are very valuable.
- locality: Topical closeness between the source page and the destination page is important. Google rewards contextually relevant links.
- firstseenDate: The date a link was first seen can indicate its age and possible long-term relevance, but it isn't as crucial as other factors.
- lastUpdateTimestamp: The date of the link's last update suggests that Google values freshness, but it isn't a decisive factor.
Link diversity:
- isLocal: Link diversity, both internal and external, is crucial. Google looks for a natural and varied link profile.
- parallelLinks: The number of additional links from the same source page to the same destination domain can be a spam signal if it's excessive.
Redirects (IndexingConverterRedirectChain):
Google tracks redirect chains to detect suspicious behavior or broken links. It's important for redirects to be transparent and to lead to the right content.
Links on localized pages (IndexingDupsLocalizedLocalizedCluster):
If your website has versions for different languages and regions, the links to those pages should be relevant to the corresponding language and region.
Link building recommendations we can draw from these leaks
- Quality over quantity: Prioritize getting a few high-quality links on relevant, authoritative websites in your niche, instead of many low-quality links.
- Contextual relevance: The link should sit within quality text: in terms of user interest, of the richness of entities related to the article's main topic and, more specifically, of the text surrounding the anchor text that links to our website.
- Topical relevance: Look for links on pages that cover topics related to your content. This point highlights the importance of concepts such as ranking affinity, which has been the foundation of how Growwer works since the very beginning.
- Natural and varied anchor text: Use a variety of relevant keywords that clearly express the content linked behind the anchor text. Use bold, underlining, colors or larger font sizes to give more weight to that text fragment, or anchor text.
- Respect the language and prioritize the country: Make sure the content your link comes from is read by your own audience. The audience and language of your ideal customer or visitor will set the language and country of your strategy.
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