Search Engine Ranking Factors

Link Neighborhood Quality

To achieve top search engine rankings, your website must be located in a good link neighborhood. Your site's link neighborhood is determined by your incoming and outgoing links, of course, but that's just the beginning. It also matters who links to the websites that link to you, who else the websites that link to you link to, to whom the websites you link to link, and so on.

If you link to websites without making sure they're not in bad link neighborhoods, you're taking a big risk. Likewise, if you allow too many incoming links from bad link neighborhoods, you increase your chances of being judged by the search engines to be part of those bad link neighborhoods. Your ability to get the top rankings for your chosen keywords will be diminished if you do not monitor and manage your link neighborhood on an ongoing basis.

For rankings purposes, remember that your website is being judged by the search engines in terms of how well it fits into its subject-community. The more integral your website appears to be to the larger community of legitimate, content-rich websites on the same topic, the more highly you will rank in the search engines for relevant terms.

Click here to return the ClickScience article, "Search Engine Ranking Factors."