Today, people Google each other on a regular basis. If you have a job interview, the employer has Googled you. If you offer a service, your prospective customers have Googled you before they phoned. If you have an introductory business meeting, the other party has likely researched you online. This is why Online Reputation Management (ORM) is critical today. While ORM is a broader topic, what we’re talking about right now is managing the Google-ability of your name, or rather, how easy it is to find you on Google and what people will see – your Google profile if you will. Now of course this discussion includes other search engines, but Google has become the verb ‘to search’ now so I’ll keep referring to Google. I’m going to split this discussion into 2 posts and focus on the background that links play in search for this post. The next post, I’ll get into actually building your profile.

The topic on how links work is rather old news to many, but complicated enough to leave many others still in the dark. I’m going to discuss this at a high level. Google ranks the relevance of a page by many factors. In general, a page is ranked based on it’s topical relevance to a keyword search and how many links point to that page. The most important factor would be the links a page has pointing to it. Here is what makes a link valuable:

1.The Page Rank (PR) of the Page the Link is From

The more popular a page is, the more valuable links from that page will be. Google has a patented algorithm that calculates the popularity of a page. You can see the page rank of a page using the Google toolbar on a scale of 1-10. This number is not the actual PR that Google uses, but it shows you the ballpark popularity of a page.

The idea here is that if you receive a link from a well established, popular page, that link will give your site more value than a brand new page or a page with few or no links pointing to it.

2.The Number of Other Links on the Linking Page

The value of a link on a page is diluted by the total number of other links on that page. For example, if a page has a page rank of 5 and there is only one outgoing link on that page, that link will carry a relative value of 5. But if there are 99 other links on that page, that link will carry a relative value of 5/100.

3.The Topic of the Linking Page

This point is simple. If my blog is all about real estate in Denver, a link from another Denver real estate site (or page) is more valuable than a link from a casino site.

4.The Text of the Link

This is a big one. Link text matters a lot. So a link to my Denver real estate site that looks like this: Denver Real Estate, is a lot better than a link that is formatted like this: click here.

5.The Reputation of the Linking Site

This relates to point three. Google gives websites a relative weighting based on the links they attract and the sites they link to. The idea is that they recognize the types of ‘neighbourhoods’ you associate with. So if a link comes from a site with a good reputation, the link will carry more weight than a link from a spammy site. For clarity, if a site is linking to other low value sites and receives links from those sites, its links will carry less value than a site that is being linked to from CNN, Yahoo, educational institutions etc.

Take a look here for a more in-depth discussion on building links:
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002357.html

In the next post, I’ll use some more examples of the above concepts and show you how to build out a strong profile to increase the Googlability of your name.