Ranking factors for search results can be described as Link Metrics. Websites with high domain authority, relevancy, and trust score higher on the world wide web. Rather than evaluating websites based on what their webmasters say, it measures how authoritative, relevant, and trusted they are by other users.
As a result of an assessment of its inbound links, search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing rank a page. When a site links to your website, that site is considered to be endorsing it. In order to rank higher in search engine results, your website must have more endorsements and therefore better authority, relevance, and trust.
PageRank
PageRank is one of the link metric algorithms developed by Google to serve as a key indicator of content quality. PageRank assigns a page a score from 1 to 10 based on the number and strength of its inbound links. Since it is logarithmic, going from 2 to 3 is 10 times harder than going from 1 to 2.
What is the process here? A link from your site to another or from one page of your site to another, or an internal link, passes ranking points. These are commonly known as “link equity” or “link juice”. PageRank, Trust Rank, etc. correspond to link “juice”, which means the more ‘link juice’ a particular page can pass along via its links.
Relevancy ranking factors
To determine a link’s relevance, a search engine analyses the following page elements. Both the sending and receiving websites are considered here:
Domain to domain
What is the purpose of the linking site? Does it have a similar purpose to yours? Among sites that share similar content, links are deemed most relevant. This link will receive brownie points from the search engines because it is relevant to the linking website, as well as the receiving website.
Domains to pages
Your website’s theme relates to the page you are linking to, right? The odds of it making contextual sense on the page are slim, especially if it’s completely irrelevant.
A page to a page
Would you both agree on what you’re talking about? You might find that similar content on another site could be relevant to your own even if your domains seem out of sync.
A relevant link would be a link on the link-passing page that links to one of your pages that is focused on electric boilers. The overall linking website may be about plumbing, but the linking page may be about piping, and the linked to page may be about boilers, so this is considered less relevant.
The link to the page
Is the content around the link relevant to your page? Is it contextually relevant or is it overdone? Webmasters also often include ‘links’ pages on their websites, where they link to external websites. These are often called ‘recommended businesses’ or variations thereof.
Ranking factors related to trust
Search engine optimization depends heavily on trust. The importance of trust changes over time. Nevertheless, there are a few basic principles:
Search engines like Google and Bing have a list of highly trusted websites.
The ‘NoFollow’ attribute and robots.txt
Since search engines have realized the value of links, they have been aggressively combating tactics that allow people to manipulate search engines, which include paid links, reciprocal or three-way links, phishing, and link baiting tactics. Manipulative links are no match for Google’s Penguin algorithm.
