The Four Dimensions of A Link Portfolio

This is a guest post by Ryan Caldwell, a writer at Performancing and College Startup.

Summary: The basic idea of this post is this. Take any object. Let’s say a house door. We can say different things about that door. Either it fits the house well or it doesn’t. Now go up a level and consider the house. What makes a good house? Well, if the majority of its parts are good parts, and they are put together in the right configuration, etc. In this post I suggest that a good link portfolio is one that is well constructed according to a natural pattern of “location” “semantics” “strength” and “duration”

We all perceive the universe as having four dimensions: Three dimensions in space (depth, width, height). One dimension in time. Whatever happens in this universe seems to occur across these four dimensions, without exception.

But this isn’t a lesson in physics. Rather, it’s an attempt to understand SEO (which occurs across time and virtual space) on the model of 4 dimensions, thinking of a website’s link portfolio as a real world object with real world properties.

A link portfolio for any given page is the total set of properties associated with the inbound links to that page. A link portfolio is like the structure of a house. It consists of many parts, and each part has its own distinct properties, but the house as a whole also exhibits unique properties not possessed by any single part.

For my purposes, you can think of links themselves as objects with properties. Just as the door (an object) to my house has a certain age (a temporal property) so do the links to my website. The door might be significantly younger than my house, just like a link to my website might be significantly younger than the website.

The door to my house has many properties other than age. It has a certain depth, width and height. It is made of certain materials. An experienced construction worker could tell you whether the door is a good door or a bad door. He would perform this evaluation based on various criteria like “does it fit in the door opening” or “does it have a good insulating value” etc.

A link to your website is just like a part of your house. It has certain properties. A link can be strong or weak. A link can be relevant or non-relevant. A link can be run-of-site or single-page. It can exist within content, in the sidebar, in the footer, in comments, or even hidden on top of a single pixel. A link can point to an existing page, or a 404 page. A link can point to the home page, a category page, or an article page. A link can have anchor text, nofollow tags …or not.

So you get the point. We should think of links as objects, just as we think of the parts of a house as objects. But, in this case it’s not just the parts of the house that have properties. The house itself has its own characteristic too, properties that are derived from the cumulative nature of its parts. A beautiful, quality, sturdy house might have a few bad parts. But it’s overall character will still shine through as fundamentally “good.” Your overall goal in building a link portfolio should be the same.

That was the introduction. Now I want to get into some specifics.

You should think of each link to your site as an object with 4 main types of properties.

The Four Dimensions of a Link

1. Location
2. Semantics
3. Strength
4. Duration

Location

One of the points you should get from this article is that some links are more important than others, yet diversity is key. You can’t build an entire house out of 2×4s - and you shouldn’t build your entire link portfolio with in-content links.

Still, some links are clearly better than others. There is a general consensus that the best type of link is one that is situated within the upper portion of textual content in an article. Next, is within the lower portion of textual content. This is followed by “below the content” resource links.

Outside of the content, the best sort of link would be right below the header. This is followed by resource or blogroll links in the left sidebar (closely followed by the same type of link in the right sidebar).

The worst position for a link, in my view, is the footer, or absolute bottom of a page.

Of course, not all inner-content links or sidebar links are created equal. This brings me to the second dimension of a link.

Semantics

A link always occurs within a semantic context. Because a link is a “relation” between two pages, each of the pages in the relationship contributes to the semantic context. What is the page that possesses the link about? What is the page that gets linked to about? If there’s a semantic match, then that stands in favor of the quality of the link. A run-of-site link in the sidebar from a similarly themed website is much better for your link profile than a run-of-site link from an irrelevant site.

Think of semantics in the same way that an interior designer thinks about matching colors and themes. Do the interior colors and objects blend well? Do they go together? The same can be asked about the two pages between which a link exists.

There’s more to semantics though, then page level analysis. There’s also site level analysis and microlocal analysis. Site level analysis seems to be getting much more important. It is no longer sufficient that a site about gadgets throw up an article about dogs with a link to a dog site. An analysis of site-level semantics diminishes the value of such a link. This is becoming especially true with the pushback that the search engines are making against PayPerPost spam.

Microlocal analysis is simply a consideration of the specific anchor text and whether semantically similar anchor text exists on the linked-to page. If so, your link becomes invaluable. However, if the size of your link portfolio is small, make sure to avoid the newbie habit of using homogeneous anchor text. “Coffee cup” repeated ten times is much worse than a natural semantic balance of “coffee cup” “my favorite coffee cup” “insulating coffee cups” and “coffee cups.”

Strength

Every link that comes to your site has its own perceived strength. Does it come from a strong, authoritative domain such as usatoday.com, about.com or harvard.edu? How about a moderately successful, recognized blog like copyblogger.com or shoemoney.com?

Strength is a complex metric that roughly indicates both the perceived authority of the domain on which the link exists, as well as the individual strength of the specific page that does the linking.

While it’s always great to get strong, quality links from heavy hitting domains, don’t forget the importance of the niche-relevant “little guys” to balance out your portfolio.

Duration

Here’s the biggest, often unspoken tip: time matters when it comes to the value of a link. Stable, long term links are the best kind. Links from social media sites are often of little long term value in themselves. They might provide a quick boost of traffic, but unless they convert into long-term links on other sites, their value can be almost completely lost in a few months.

I ran an experiment recently where I collected a lot of long term links very quickly. The page receiving the links was penalized. But only for about 2 months. It then jumped from page 21 in the SERPS, all the way to page 2 and is on the verge of climbing onto the first page. The moral of that story? Search engines buffer against short-term gain from links, but remove the buffer after a probationary period of time. If your links are long term, they should increase and then retain most of their value.

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