Volitional Links
MAKING LINKS THAT INCREASE USER VALUE AND BUILD SEARCH ENGINE TRUST
It’s easy to tell when you’re visiting a page or a site created by an SEO. The titles are nice, the URLs are nice, the images have ALT tags, and there is a certain self-consciousness evident in the links they have made and in the ways they have made them. I am not talking about intra-site navigational links. I am talking about the links that are made purposefully by the author of the page. These links are, I have been asserting for a while now, the important links on a site, because they reflect the ideas and intentions of the author. Because blogs and other CMSs automatically generate the navigational links, Google knows to treat them differently. What Google is looking for are the choices you have made when you created your links. This is where you will reveal wehether you are to be trusted and whether your site contributes value to the Web, and if so how much. Blogroll links, while more telling about you and your blog than automatically-generated intra-site links, are less important to Google (unless they reveal a gross Trust Violation) than what I am going to call Volitional Links… more