|
|
 |
 |
Webmaster Articles
/ Does The Number Of Links On A Page Affect Ranking?
Does The Number Of Links On A Page Affect Ranking?
by Jon Ricerca
http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com
Lots of research has focused on inbound links to a site,
but little has focused on the number of links actually
on a page (outbound or to other parts of a site). Many
SEO gurus have recently been talking about something
they call "PR Leak" which seems to be a theory that the
more outbound links you have, the more your page rank on
Google "leaks" away. That concept isn't found in the
academic papers published by the founders of Google, but
does seem to be accepted by a majority of SEOs. I
decided it was time to take a look at the number of
links present on a page and how that number correlates
with ranking.
The methodology: I gathered the results of the queries
that were naturally performed last month by myself and
three associates using the two leading search engines
and analyzed them. I counted the number of links on the
page (references to "href") and tabulated the results
against the ranking of the URL in the search results.
The tabulated results were finally converted into a
normalized "ranking correlation." The results for each
of the two leading search engines were kept separate so
that we could discover any differences between the two
leading search engines for this factor.
The resulting graphs show the results for groupings of
number of links normalized into a number between -100
and
+100 showing the likelihood of being ranked
higher/lower.
A value of +100 shows that all 10 rankings were in the
proper order to show that pages of the studied value
ALWAYS rank HIGHER than pages of another value. A value
of -100 shows that all 10 rankings were in the proper
order to show that pages of the studied value ALWAYS
rank LOWER than pages of another value. Numbers in
between show the varying likelihood of rankings
proportionally between - 100 and +100.
That is the number you see on the Y-axis. On the X-axis,
we have the number of links found. They are grouped into
sets of 10 in order to increase the statistical
significance with the amount of data we had available to
analyze. Here are the graphs for the two leading search
engines:
http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com/graphs/dey01.gif
http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com/graphs/deg01.gif
(Note to webmasters: Feel free to hot link to the above
graphs or copy them to your own site if you publish this
report. Feel free to remove this note as well.)
The number of links were grouped in this way in order to
increase the number of data points available.
Unfortunately it also reduces the precision of the
results. One is able to see that 91-100 links rank much
higher than 1-10 links, but you are unable to see if 77
links rank differently than 79 links (for example).
The result is very conclusive. Both leading search
engines rank pages with more links much higher than
pages with fewer links! Once again, it appears that the
SEOs touting the "PR Leak" theory are simply wrong. If
their theory held any weight at all, we should see the
exact opposite.
Pages with more links should rank lower on average.
Notes:
1. There was no exercise to attempt to isolate different
keywords. I merely took a random sampling of the queries
performed by myself and three associates during the
month.
2. This is merely a correlation study, so it cannot be
determined from this study whether the leading search
engines purposefully entertain this factor or not. The
actual factors used may be far distant from the factor
we studied.
Jon Ricerca is one of the leading researchers and
authors of the Search Engine Ranking Factor (SERF)
reports at SearchEngineGeek.com. For access to the other
SERF reports, please visit:
http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com
back to articles section. |
|
|
Professional Templates
More than 1300 web templates, flash templates, flash intro, joomla templates, drupal templates, wordpress templates and more
at
deonixdesign.com |
|
|
|
|
