Passing On Information through Links Friday, Oct 27 2006 

I have been talking about it for months, I have been actually going thoroughly into the issue for months. That makes most of the ideas I have been expressing obsolete, which is why my theories about links and languages need be revised.

In this article, I aim at explaining to myself and to those who follow me what I think about passing on information, and I would like to stress that I will be analyzing only how it is connected to links. Therefore, I am not going to talk about all other information useful for search engines, such as: whois, structure and traffic.

Links are crucial both for the SEO (in their mind the idea that links give the site a boost is inculcated ever since they were children), and for the search engine. Through this system, the engine can get to know the different aspects of one site, simply by connecting it to the different sites it is linked by and to the sites it links to.

However, the link is not not be considered as a mere boost, as it is a sort of vectorial container of information. It does make more sense to think of it as a Complete Force (needless to say, as Forces always have this nature, despite the average SEO being convinced of the contrary), a force featuring magnitude, direction and orientation.

Let’s suppose that every link is determined by these three factors only and let’s see how links are far complexer than one would think.

We shall define the magnitude of a link as the value indicating the boost it will have on the linked page; we shall define orientation and direction as what links head for in a multidimensional space.

It does not matter what these dimensions actually are in the search engines (they may be languages, topics or other things). Now what matters is that we understand that any link has a boost determined by magnitude, but it also features a direction and an orientation this magnitude is applied to, moving our object (the page) towards a specific place.

As SEOs, we do not want to just move the page, but we do want to move it aiming at a specific target.

So, only by considering the link as a force endowed with magnitude, direction and orientation, it is possible to sense 3 main ideas:

1. Linking a page in order to reach a good ranking is not enough, it is necessary to give the link a specific direction and orientation, otherwise we may end up further away from our goal.
2. An absolute penalty for search engines does not exist, but relative penalties do exist: that is, penalties due to failure to reach a goal. Introducing a link that moves us towards the wrong direction is a relative penalty, as it moves us further away from the goal we had targeted, but it does take us closer to something else. Nevertheless, this “something else” might be not only totally useless to us, but even harmful.
3. Also, it is clear that the “penalty” is not due to the magnitude of the link, but to its direction. In order to reach our goal, the direction we are heading for is more important than how strongly we are heading for that direction.

The task of a skilled webmaster is not to link a web page, but to understand where the link will take us.

Now forget about links as vector forces. I’ll make myself clearer: what search engines use is probably the idea of links as vector forces, but restricting ourselves to that might be counterproductive. What currently matters to us most is the information behind links, rather than their mathematical side.

So let’s concentrate on the links and continue to define them as vectors, but devoid of direction and orientation: vectors featuring magnitude and information only.

Magnitude is, as usual, the simplest side and it is always possible to define it as the boost a page gets.

The information content, on the contrary, becomes our direction and our orientation and indicates where we are moving to.

As many of you know, the information I prefer to talk about is language. This is in fact the information we can be more easily aware of, for example by doing a simple test such as that by Tagliaerbe [Link in Italian]. It is generally easy to experience that a page with a context in language A, linked mainly and massively by pages with contents (and/or BackLinks) in language B, will be considered by the search engine as a page written in the language B. Also, it is clear how this is not an absolute penalty, but rather a penalty relative to our goal. This is due to the fact that, in general, the goal of all sites in language A is to rank by the term in language A and, above all, in the search engine in language A, whereas being ranked by terms in language B is totally useless to these sites.

However, this is not due to the search engine. It is our fault for having passed the wrong information.

A different type of information considered by the search engines and passed on (also) through links is the topic. The topic characterizes our page and it brings it closer or moves it away from specific keywords. I doubt whether there is much to be said about this, as it is very easily understood what is the interest that connects this information to the search engine. It is perhaps more difficult to understand how the search engine manages to determine how close to or how far from a certain topic we are.

As far as this is concerned, I only have vague theories, therefore I suggest you don’t trust what I’ll be saying and I hope someone will provide a better explanation.

I believe all information passed on through links is organized in a multidimensional space that considers the page as a point in this space. Therefore, a single piece of information does not exist, for example:

1. Language: English
2. Topic: cooking

More probably, information composed of all possible entries and of the extent to which each entry is true does exist (through Fuzzy logic).

The objection that may be raised in this case is:

if the logic of search engines is not boolean but fuzzy, then why do links in english to an italian page make it lose positions in italian search engines? These data on the italian language, in fact, do not get lost, neither are they less than before: so, if my page was at the first place on a SERP and had 50 italian links and 0 english links and it is now at the 57^th place in the SERP and has 67 italian links and 565 english links, why has a “penalty” occurred? My page is not less italian than before, it is only more english!

Remembering that I do not know the truth about these issues, I will suggest my theory: the language factor is composed of weights that are distributed in proportion to the main language. So, in the above example, it is true that the web page did not lose any italian links (on the contrary, it has got some more compared to before), but these links move the page more to the english sector and away from the italian one, due to their being less than the english links.

The same thing happens in the case of the topic.

There is more information passed on through the link: the information usually defined as the trust of a site that basically gives a consistency value both to the site and to us when we are linked.

I am definitely lacking knowledge on this subject, but based on the opinion I formed, the trust may very well be passed on as a single fuzzy value and not as a value composed of the different information contents that have created it. This value, however, will contain all those data defining the consistency of a site and moving it closer to or away from spam, that is information about whois, structure and probably traffic.

I’ll better be talking about those next time. Also, I will be talking more in detail about the Graph theory: I preferred not to mention it, despite being strictly connected to the ideas expressed in this article, as it is not crucial for defining the link as information passing on, but it is essential in passing on the information.