360DigitalInfluence

For my second interview of Search Engine Strategies speakers I’ve had the privilege of connecting with Sharad Verma from Yahoo!

Sharad is a senior product manager for content, crawl, and indexing systems of Yahoo Search Technology. Before joining Yahoo in 2007, he worked for multiple Silicon Valley startups.   Sharad graduated from IIT Bombay (India) with a degree in chemical engineering in 1999.

Sharad will be speaking on the panel Discovering the Power of Linking: Link Building Basics, as well as several others.  The term “Link Building“  is often discussed among marketing and pr professional, however, more often than not a genuine understanding of what goes into this effort is lacking.  Hopefully Sharad will be able to clear some things up with this Q&A.

1.  Can you explain how Yahoo! analyzes an inbound link in an effort to create the most relevant search results?

Yahoo! Slurp crawls the Web 24/7. Links from the crawled documents are extracted and a web graph is computed on the set. This link graph helps us weed out link spam, determine aggregate link votes, compute region of interest, and identify web mirrors etc. External inbound links carry more weight than the internal inbound links. However internal inbound links are often a good source of anchor text. Inbound links from comment sections of pages are largely ignored. In general, inbound links from popular pages contribute more to the ranking score than links from less popular pages.

2.  Through blogger outreach, press releases and online partnerships, the public relations professional is often in a position to build powerful links to a website.  What is one piece of advice you would give a PR professional (who is not familiar with how search engines analyze links) that will help them get more bang for their buck in regards to building links?

Try to identify authoritative sites and directories in your space and get links from them. Anchor text on links are equally important; so ensure you are getting representative anchors (which have your target key words) with the links. Do some trial and error searches to determine the rank importance of the pages you are requesting links from. Quality is more important than quantity. Perform link building in stages; check periodically to see if linking is improving the ranking. Links are not the only factor in relevance, there are many other factors that play a role.

3.  In your opinion, what delivers a better return on investment, link building or link bait?

Link building by definition is a long term and continuous effort. If you are a restaurant website, just being on directories won’t cut it in 2009 (it worked well in 2000); you need to have links from new and popular sources such as Yelp, blogs etc. The Web is constantly evolving and links need to be kept updated. Link bait may work in the short term; however we look at links in context. As long as you get links from source pages that are related to the context of your page, these links will weigh in relevance scores.

4.  Will inbounds links always be a major part of achieving high search engine rankings?

Links are an important part of getting noticed on the web, get anchor descriptions and achieve 3rd party certificates on popularity – and all these factors are very important in determining indexability and ranking. However links are not the only factors. We look at pages in their entirety and apply our best guesses at how the user is experiencing your website. There are internal feedback loops that can attenuate any ranking signal. How a user experiences your site is a very important factor in ranking. We don’t see the use of links going away in the foreseeable future.

Thanks for your time and expertise Sharad!  Readers, did this help clear up  Link Building?  What else do you want to know about link building?  You are probably thinking, “ok I get it, now how do I get those links”.  Check out this post Link Building Strategies: 69 Solid Tactics for 2009 (2009 SEMMY Award Winner)  Good Luck!