Google Backlink Categories
Google uses 3 basic elements to analyse every website and web page it finds;
Quality
Trust
Authority
Quality covers your website content, site structure, build quality, originality and ‘usefulness’ of your content for users etc.
Trust covers the metrics that Google can assess related to the company behind your website. Google looks at your terms and conditions, registered address of your domain, your ‘transparency’ online and these metrics indicate your trustworthiness for ranking purposes.
Additionally, the search engine judges you based on your online associations, use of known link networks, use of black hat SEO practices etc.
Authority is measured by the back-links that point at your website. In an ideal world you want the most authoritative sites within your business niche to refer to your web content as being a valuable resource for their users.
Google Authority
Google categorises websites based on the category of the link that point to them. A site linking to you that has a category of computers/web design and a ‘Trust Flow’ score of 28 will pass a computers/web design category to you along with the trust flow score.
While the trust flow score is diluted (you won’t suddenly increase your score up to 28 via this link alone) it will add to your trust flow score.
The dominant back-links pointing to your site or a page of your site will pass their category to your site or page.
Link sculpting services from the specialist companies such as Deeho can help you to build category specific links which in turn will build the trust and citation flow metrics for your site category.
No Follow Category Links
Evidence shows that no follow links do pass their category in their links, but at a much reduced rate.
It is possible to define your site or page category using no follow links alone, but it requires a much greater volume, with good quality scores (trust and citation flow) & the addition of category specific do follow links will have a much better affect, faster.
Link Categories Can Change
Just because you create a link from a niche category, don’t assume that it will remain static in that category. If the page with your link were to attract a new high power link from a random category, or to lose it’s most powerful link, it can easily lose its categorisation and be reclassified into a different niche, altering the affect that it has on your site.
While link categories aren’t the be all and end all, they play an important part in link sculpting because while not true for all, for many authority blogs and sites, the link category defines their Google rankings.
Examining the top ranking sites in most high traffic niches reveals that the majority of them have a specific niche relevant back-link category. There are of course exceptions to every rule and you will find some sites that rank very well for competitive terms without having a dominant link category relevance, but in most of these cases, they have high powered links from .govs, .edus and other hightly trusted authority sites.
Google understands that for many sites, that it knows to be otherwise niche authorities, they can’t control who links to them, so for example, if you have a site about Google rankings, and the BBC deside to reference your content, you would earn a very high powered link but from and irrelevant media/entertainment category. As an internet marketing company this isn’t ideal….. but it’s a hell of a link and google understand the importance of it, despite the category.
For the majority of normal sites, it’s very difficult to get the BBC to link to you, so we have to instead build category specific links from Google friendly sites in order to establish the categorisation of our site.
Sculpting back-links is one of many areas of website marketing that you can learn about http://www.seo-trainingcourses.com, allowing you to increase the trust and authority of your site.