Methods of Link Analysis

In link analysis, search engines measure who is linking to a site or page and what they are saying about that site/page. They also have a good grasp on who is affiliated with whom (through historical link data, the site’s registration records, and other sources), who is worthy of being trusted based on the authority of sites linking to them, and contextual data about the site on which the page is hosted (who links to that site, what they say about the site, etc.).

Link analysis goes much deeper than counting the number of links a web page or website has, as links are not created equal. Links from a highly authoritative page on a highly authoritative site will count more than other links of lesser authority. A website or page can be determined to be authoritative by combining an analysis of the linking patterns and semantic analysis.

For example, perhaps you are interested in sites about dog grooming. Search engines can use semantic analysis to identify the collection of web pages that focus on the topic of dog grooming. The search engines can then determine which of these sites about dog grooming have the most links from the set of dog grooming sites. These sites are most likely more authoritative on the topic than the others.

The actual analysis is a bit more complicated than that. For example, imagine that there are five sites about dog grooming with a lot of links from pages across the Web on the topic, as follows:

- Site A has 213 topically related links.

- Site B has 192 topically related links.

- Site C has 203 topically related links.

- Site D has 113 topically related links.

- Site E has 122 topically related links.

Further, it may be that Site A, Site B, Site D, and Site E all link to each other, but none of them link to Site C. In fact, Site C appears to have the great majority of its relevant links from other pages that are topically relevant but have few links to them. In this scenario, Site C is definitively not authoritative because it is not linked to by the right sites.

This concept of grouping sites based on their relevance is referred to as a link neighborhood. The neighborhood you are in says something about the subject matter of your site, and the number and quality of the links you get from sites in that neighborhood say something about how important your site is to that topic.

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