Introduction To Link Clusters
April 11th, 2008 by CourtIn 30 short pages my ebook shows you exactly how to set up a low-maintenance income online using free traffic from Google. You'll learn:
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Link cluster: A group of links designed to improve the credibility of a web page, according to visitors and search engines. Translation: You can use a link cluster to get a lot more traffic to a web page.
Take a look at the two red guys in the image below. The gray people are followers of the red fellow on the right. The fellow on the left apparently has no followers. You tell me, which red guy has more credibility? If they were both giving you advice, which one would you trust?
Most of us will probably choose the one on the right. Is it a lock that we made the right choice? Of course not. Is it fairly likely that we made the right choice? Maybe.
So the guy on the right has 17 followers. Is that enough to prove that he is a credible resource of the information we need? Probably not, but looking at our options he is probably the best choice, right?
Now let’s assume that there’s a third red guy that has 500,000 followers. This makes the choice a lot easier, right? If they all claim to have information on a certain topic, and guy number three has 29,000 times as many people that trust him for information on that topic, it gets easier to assume that he has better information.
You probably use this principle often with or without realizing it. Let’s say that you need to learn about a specific aspect of business and would like to buy a book. You head over to Barnes and Noble, or you go to Amazon.com. You will probably find several books on that topic. Are you going to buy the book that sold 2,000 copies in 4 years or the book that has sold 2,000,000 copies this year?
Let’s say you want to go to a movie this weekend. Would you rather go to a movie that’s flopping or one that is breaking records at the box office? You won’t always be 100% correct by following this methodology, but overall it will probably save you from seeing some real snoozers.
This Off-line Principle Is The Basis Of Google
When Google was created by two college students in 1997, they recognized that this off-line principle could be used to determine the relevancy of pages on the internet, by using links to prove how credible a web page is. Please read this excerpt from their report:
Indeed, we want our notion of “relevant” to only include the very best documents since there may be tens of thousands of slightly relevant documents. This very high precision is important even at the expense of recall (the total number of relevant documents the system is able to return). There is quite a bit of recent optimism that the use of more hypertextual information can help improve search and other applications [Marchiori 97] [Spertus 97] [Weiss 96] [Kleinberg 98]. In particular, link structure [Page 98] and link text provide a lot of information for making relevance judgments and quality filtering. Google makes use of both link structure and anchor text (see Sections 2.1 and 2.2).
As they stated in this report, Google believes that “link structure” and “anchor text” helps them to evaluate the credibility of web pages.
Link Structure
A web page that has been linked to 17 times has more credibility with Google than a web page that has been linked to 0 times. A web page that has been linked to 500,000 times has more credibility than a page that has been linked to 17 times. Google also uses the credibility of pages linking to your web page as part of the equation.
Anchor Text
Let’s assume that we have two web pages about the same topic, page A and page B. Page A and page B both have exactly one link pointing at them, and both are coming from the same page, which we’re going to call page C.
In this example, both page A and page B are about ‘great big stupid moronic idiots’ and we want to determine which one Google will find to be the most relevant for related keywords. Let’s assume that Page C links to page A using ‘great big idiots’ and to page B using ’stupid moronic idiots’.
Which page will probably come up first in Google if you searched for ‘great big idiots’? Page A. However, page B would come up first for ’stupid moronic idiots’.
Using Link Clusters To Increase Rankings
We have established that increasing the amount of links pointing at a page will increase its credibility with Google, especially if the links use the keyword we want to rank for as anchor text. How is this useful? It’s simple, you can create link clusters using two methods:
- Using links within your site to increase the credibility of a web page. In other words, you could edit 10+ or 100+ posts or pages within your site, creating links that point to the page whose credibility you’re trying to increase. You can work the links in naturally so that they can provide a benefit to the people that are reading the pages you’re linking from. Using relevant anchor text will increase this technique’s effectiveness. The more links you create, the more effective this cluster will be.
- Using links from other sites to increase the credibility of a web page. You might have other sites that you can use, or for that matter friends that have other sites. You can use Squidoo, Blogger, and other free hosting services to create pages and links. You can ask other sites to link to your pages. You can use Article Marketer to create links. You can use social media to market your page - that may lead to more links if your content is worthy. Each of these methods will increase the credibility of your web page. Again, using relevant anchor text will increase the effectiveness of this type of cluster. The more links you put in the cluster, the more effective it will be.
You can use this principle to improve a ranking for any type of web page. It will help with a flagship blog, and Squidoo lens, a niche blog, an e-commerce store, or any other type of web page. The possibilities are endless.
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April 11th, 2008 at 2:25 pm
Great info Court. I had no idea that internal linking within your site helped. For some reason I thought google might frown on that. Is there any risk we run by linking too frequently to our own posts from the same site?
April 11th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
In my opinion, don’t be ridiculous about it, but doing it like 2-4 times, depending on the size of the post, can be wonderful.
Google in fact LIKES it, as opposed to frowns on it, because it see the internal links, and it makes the assumption that it makes your website easier to read, and easier to find the information people are looking for.
April 11th, 2008 at 2:55 pm
Shouldn’t you be increasing the linking within your site anyway so that your site’s users can find their way around more easily? Google likes it for that reason.
April 11th, 2008 at 2:49 pm
Link clusters are a great idea… I am really going to be exploring this concept, especially the aspects of creating pages that link to your content, and creating links to that, in turn increasing the value of the link to my main page on that one.
I know this is a common technique for those higher end internet marketers, but for newbies it is a hard concept to grasp… I am going to be attempting to make it attainable for us newb’s. hehe.
April 11th, 2008 at 3:43 pm
Great advice, linking is one of the most important things when it comes to SEO. Google just absolutely loves links! We’re talking serious obsession here — both internal and external. Internal links are one of those things that people often forget about in their linking campaigns, even though they are just as important. When the spiders are going through your site, it’s nice for them to have multiple avenues to index your content — solid linking strategies internally will certainly play dividends in the long run.
April 11th, 2008 at 4:10 pm
Hey Court. One question about links: are outbound links really important? Do I HAVE to link to high ranked, relevant sites? Does Google likes that or not?
I keep reading in some sites that you may lose some PR juice by doing that, but is some other sites they say it doesn’t cause Google loves that.
I’m lost!
April 11th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
Tara that’s a very good question. The answer is that outbound links have little effect. That helps the sites you’re linking to but don’t really help you.
April 12th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
From my research on PR and search algorithms, out links will help with some algorithms, but not really google’s (PR).
Some algorithms look at sites as incoming and outgoing hubs.
The effect of out going links is that it can give out some authority. I don’t think it has huge effects though. There are several high PR directories. Incoming links are the major factor.
Bottom line is doing whats best for your visitors. If a link is required do it. If its a great resource, you should do follow.
April 11th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
This all makes sense to me. The more links or “votes” a site has the more “weight” google gives it compared to other similar sites. And add to that the correct anchor text and you have a winner.
I have a question though. Do you think that external links and internal links have the same value generally speaking?
I hear a lot that external links are more valuable than internal links, but I tend to believe that it depends on the “authority” of the sites in question. Internal links could be more valuable if your comparing them to external links that have less authority.
I’d appreciate your thoughts on this.
April 11th, 2008 at 5:38 pm
External links will usually count for more, but you’re right. If your site is very authoritative, an internal link from your site might be worth more than an external link from a weaker site.
If your site and an outside site had similar authority, the external link from the other site would probably be worth more.
April 11th, 2008 at 4:45 pm
This is great! You took a seemingly complex part of the Google “thing” and turned it into something that makes real sense for even those not that tech savvy.
And I particularly like that you focused on “webPAGES” and not websites. Many newbies and solopreneurs (my clients) often misunderstand this critical point.
Thanks!
Maria Reyes-McDavis
April 11th, 2008 at 8:47 pm
Link clusters was not a term i was at all familiar with and i don’t even have nodding acquaintance with the complex principles that Google function on. So thanks for making things clearer for me!
April 11th, 2008 at 8:53 pm
Thank you also for emphasizing the importance of anchor text.
April 11th, 2008 at 10:38 pm
Court-
You speak about specific pages in this post and how that helps the page. Can you explain how building links to one page may increase the rankings for the entire site.
For example: If I have an amazing post that gets picked up by Fox News, Wall Street Journal and 100’s of other very credible sites and it anchors “great big idiots” to that one post, how much “bleed over” PR does my site about “great big stupid moronic idiots in politics” get?
April 14th, 2008 at 4:04 pm
From my own experience, pages are pretty much treated as individuals when it comes to ranking, so if one of your internal pages gets lots on link love, then it will in turn pass it back to your home page, which then passes it out to all your other pages. It’s no different to getting a link from an external page of equal standing to your home page. (In my opinion anyway)
April 12th, 2008 at 12:33 am
There you go again, giving invaluable advise. Thanks. The bit about the guys in google writing about link support, makes the post very interesting and such snippets will really make your posts a bit more lively.
April 12th, 2008 at 3:25 am
Court, thanks for making the issue of internal linking a bit clearer to me. In actual fact, I have started an internal linking campaign on my sites but didn’t realise just how important it was! I have a question about anchor text for you and I will make an example of the name I have used in this comment.
) I would normally just leave my name (TonyC). On other blogs I may leave my name and the keyword in brackets (as above- by the way, I don’t normally do this on this blog. I just did it for the example). And on blogs that I don’t really visit that often but see comments with ‘keywords’ as the name only, I will do likewise.
The url points to one of my sites, obviously, but I have a choice when it comes to filling the name part out (which would be classed as the anchor text).
When I leave a comment on blogs I respect and value (like yours
So, bringing me to my question. What effect would each particular scenario have on the value of the outgoing link? Or does it have any effect seeing as your blog, for example, is totally unrelated to my niche?
Hope all this makes sense Court and I haven’t bored you too much, but this is always an issue that has confused me
April 12th, 2008 at 11:02 am
In the end, it’s all a matter of anchor texts, and the way you manage to vary those anchor texts.
April 12th, 2008 at 11:21 am
Court, if I have several keyword sniping sites on various topics should I link those together to create a link cluster? I’ve heard that creating a web ring like that can hurt your rankings.
April 14th, 2008 at 4:13 pm
Depends how smart you are about it. I have bought up several expired domains and used them as link blogs, and I have got sites ranked number 1 for sniper terms, using just those links. But I use several different servers, IPs Registry names, themes etc. So they are pretty much as different as they can get.
Is it a little black hat, sure, but it also works. (until the day it doesn’t)
April 12th, 2008 at 1:08 pm
Linking to specific pages within your page is a great idea… good informative post!
April 12th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
[…] 10 Ways To Improve Blog Traffic In 30 Minutes Or less Wordpress 2.5 Sidebar Widgets Guide Introduction To Link Clusters 5 Lessons From Newspapers To Boost Your Blogs Circulation Creating A Custom Page Template Why […]
April 12th, 2008 at 7:32 pm
Nice post. Good way to put together PR concepts in a simple post.
Seems like you’ve covered this topic through out your blog, and am surprised that this stuff was new to your readers.
Link authority + page rank 101 IMO
I think you’ve covered these concepts in about 5 other posts.
April 12th, 2008 at 10:44 pm
Great post Court! I’ve been incorporating this method into most of my niche sites. Now it’s matter of time to see how effective this strategy is in the long run! I am very hopeful that it will only help us out!
Thanks,
Sal
April 13th, 2008 at 7:20 am
Great information! Linking the anchor text is a smart thing to do.
April 15th, 2008 at 5:47 am
[…] me to say this. That reason is “link clusters”. Courtney Tuttle wrote a great post on link clusters and what they can do for your rankings the other […]
April 15th, 2008 at 6:53 am
Is there a penalty for linking between sites which are all hosted on the same shared hosting? I have a couple of older sites which now have PR - Im wondering if I should put my newer sites with a different host so they “look different” to google - does that make sense?
April 15th, 2008 at 7:05 am
I don’t think there is a penalty, but they just wont do you any good if google figures it out.
Some people think its a risk, but personally I don’t think it can be.
For example, if it were possible to do damage to a site by linking to it, it means anyone could setup thousands of links to a competitors site, and get them deranked. Its for that reason I don’t think there is such thing as a penalty, only a filter that ignores some links.
April 15th, 2008 at 1:08 pm
A nice strategy, and definitely one I have had much success with.
If I could add one more bit of advice to this post it would be to keep things simple, follow the tips listed here but don’t OVER DO IT! Google likes things to look natural…
April 17th, 2008 at 8:38 am
Thanks for that info Court, there is always something new to be learned, and your site seems to have it’s finger on the pulse.
April 18th, 2008 at 1:45 am
[…] Introduction To Link Clusters at Court’s Internet Marketing School. […]
April 21st, 2008 at 9:30 pm
[…] Article by Courtney of courtneytuttle.com […]
May 4th, 2008 at 7:51 am
Great topic Court! In regards to the links clusters, which I have been trying to build, I find it very time consuming to build PR in your clusters to pass on to your main site. Should more time be spent on building up authority on your clusters than on the main site? Or are the clusters so broad that they can be used many times on different sites?
Denise
November 14th, 2008 at 8:09 pm
You explain deep-linking well but it can be quite a chore to search back on our relevant posts we have written and link to them.
March 23rd, 2009 at 7:49 pm
I have been following you and Griz for a bit and lately noticed how much the two of you encourage backlinks. I also read your Keyword Crash Course and have been looking at Unique Article Wizard. I am in the process of building a niche site and am a little confused.
Is it best for me to just set up a niche site, throw up a few pages and then use something like UAW and Griz’s free backlink community? Or is it better for me to create something like a blog with multiple posts and cross link inside as well as the above? And, how do you determine which information is published on the site or via an article wizard?
Thanks!!