Link Diversity

Let's face it, even the concept of relevancy is misunderstood and misquoted.  The bigger the scale of the link network, the harder it becomes to hide.. And finally, link diversity means obtaining variety of text in links and kinds of links, such as do follow links and no follow links .. The image is from important research paper titled,  Spam, Damn Spam, and Statistics  .  It illustrates how statistical analysis is able to spot patterns in links. they suggested to add links from other sources as well, so that the backlink profile would not stand out as different from normal link profiles. The idea of looking natural springs from the revelation in 2005 that Google has been using statistical analysis to see if link profile is normal or statistically different.. Modern link analysis does things like use seed set of trusted sites and from there Google calculates the distances from those trusted sites to site that wants to rank for certain keyword phrase.. The bad links can not hide under the volume of regular non-optimized links. This new way of finding spam, called Penguin, changes the definition of what a natural link profile looks like. This is why I came to the conclusion that link diversity should be put to the back of the line of SEO factors to worry about, if not discarded entirely.. patterns in the linking, and whois and hosting IP information could be used to identify relationships between sites that linking to each other and catch link selling and spamming.. But other the criteria for links is about removing the influence of irrelevant links so that only the relevant links remain as part of the ranking process.  Read more