Ranking test: can there be too many links to your home page?

In an online webmaster forum, a webmaster described the link experiment that he did with his websites. He tried to find out how linking to the home page affected his rankings.

What did the webmaster test?

The webmaster tested the effect of links from sub pages of his website to his home page. He tried links to the home page of his website from the navigation and from the content and he tried links with and without keywords.

The test was done with a 4 year old domain name with a dedicated IP address. The web pages were HTML only. The website ranks top 5 in Google for its main, second and third keyword phrases and it has a total of 90 pages with unique content.

What were the results of the test?

It seems that too many links to the home page of your website can have a negative effect on your rankings:

1. Linking to the home page from every page in the content with the same keyword caused a six pages drop in rankings (-6 pages).
2. Linking to the home page from every page in the content using keyword variations caused a three pages drop in rankings (-3 pages).
3. Linking to the home page from the navigation with “main keyword” also caused a six pages drop in rankings (-6 pages).
4. Linking to the home page from the first 10 pages listed on Google.com for “site:domain.com/*” increased the ranking from 5th to 3rd (+2 positions).

The webmaster also observed the following:

• Linking from the content using keyword variations was effective to a point, after which the rankings dropped.
• There seems to be a page threshold. If the number of pages that link is even slightly above the threshold, the rankings will drop.

Does this mean that you shouldn’t link to your home page?

It’s hard to tell whether the results of this experiment are valid because there are too many other variables that influence the rankings of a web page.

It doesn’t sound sensible that Google will downrank a web page that has a link to its home page on every page. Most users expect a link to the home page on every page of a website and even Google has a link to its home page from every page.

As Google’s usual webmaster advice is to focus on the website user, it seems implausible that Google would penalize home page links.

We think that it’s more likely that the ranking drops are caused by Google’s change filter. If you change your web page contents, Google will temporarily downrank your web pages. This has been described in a Google patent.

How the bounce rate of your website can affect your Google rankings

Does Google use the bounce rate of a web page to specify the position of that page in the search results? What does this mean for your website rankings and what can you do to get a better bounce rate?

What is the bounce rate?

There are two definitions: the bounce rate of your website is the percentage of visitors who see just one page of your website or the percentage of visitors who stay on your site for a small amount of time (only a few seconds).

The bounce rate helps you to measure the quality of traffic that your website gets and it also helps you to find out where your web pages could be improved.

Google’s definition of the bounce rate

The Google Analytics documentation defines the bounce rate as follows:

“Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page). Bounce rate is a measure of visit quality and a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren’t relevant to your visitors.”

This Google definition already indicates that Google thinks that web pages with a high bounce rate aren’t relevant to website visitors. If your web pages have a high bounce rate for a search term, Google might lower the rankings of your website for that search term.

Does Google use the bounce rate as a ranking factor?

Google has the ability to collect the bounce rate with the Google toolbar and Google Analytics. In addition, Google can measure the time between visits to their search engine by the same user and they can use the Google Chrome browser to measure the complete surfing behavior of users.

Last month, a webmaster performed a test that showed a significant ranking change as a result of a significant bounce rate change. The test is not very conclusive but chances are that Google really uses the bounce rate as a ranking factor.

The bounce rate alone might not be used by Google but combined with other factors, it could have an effect on the rankings. For example, Google could measure how many people start a new search for the same topic after visiting your web page. That would be an indicator that your website is not suitable for the chosen keyword.

What can you do to lower the bounce rate of your web pages?

A high bounce rate is usually a sign of a low quality web page. This means that your web page either doesn’t offer what the visitor is searching for or the usability of your web page isn’t good.

If you improved the contents and the usability of your web pages, you might lower your bounce rate from 75% to 65%. This would lead to a remarkable 40% increase in conversions (35 out of 100 visitors now stay on your website instead of 25 out of 100 visitors).

In addition to improving the usability of your web pages, you can lower your bounce rate by tailoring your landing pages to the keywords and ads that you run. If your landing pages offer the information that the searchers are looking for then you will get a lower bounce rate.

Lowering the bounce rate of your web pages has two major benefits: it’s likely that you will get more visitors from search engines and you will get a higher conversion rate. The only exceptions to the scenario above are one page websites and web pages that offer very compelling content on a single web page (for example Wikipedia pages).

Search engines use many more ranking factors than just the bounce rate. If you want to get high rankings on Google and other search engines, you should make sure that your web pages offer all elements that are necessary to get high rankings.

Do search engines think that your website is spam?

About three weeks ago, Microsoft was granted a new patent with the name Web Spam Classification Using Query Dependent Data. Although this patent application was filed by Microsoft, all major search engines probably use similar methods to classify web pages.

How do search engines analyze web pages?

Search engines look at a number of elements that can appear on web pages and within queries that web surfers use to find these pages.

For example, search engines may look for the most frequent keyword in the web page, the number of times a particular keyword appears in the web page, the domain name associated with the web page, the number of links pointing to the page, the HTML tags in which a keyword appears and many other factors.

The patent filing indicates that search engines look at hundreds of different factors to rank web pages.

How search engines try to detect spammy pages

The are so many potential spam pages on the Internet that search engines cannot identify all spam pages manually.

To identify potential spam pages, search engines might manually label some web pages as spam and then take information from that pages to find other spam pages.

For example, a web page that uses keyword stuffing has more keywords than a legitimate page. By training the spam detection algorithm with a few web pages that use keyword stuffing, other web pages that use keyword stuffing can be detected automatically.

In other words, a spam detection algorithm labels web pages as spam or not spam by looking at decisions made by humans. According to the patent application, the algorithm might look at the following factors:

• the number of inbound links coming from labeled spam pages
• the top level domain of the site
• the quality of phrases in the document and density of keywords (spammy terms)
• the count of the most frequent term
• the count of the number of unique terms
• the total number of terms and the number of words in the path
• the number of words in the title
• the rank of the domain and the average number of words
• the top-level domain
• the number of hits within a domain
• the number of users of a domain
• the number of hits on a URL and the number of users of a URL
• the date the URL was crawled, the last date page changed
• many more factors

If your website uses similar elements as the spammy web page then it’s likely that your website will be classified as spam. The usual impact of a website being labeled as spam is that the site might be pushed down in search results, or removed completely.

What does this mean for your website?

You should make sure that your web pages use similar elements as the top ranked pages instead of elements that can be found on spam pages.

How long can a text link be if it should improve your rankings?

The words that are used in the links to your website have an effect on the search engine rankings of your website for these keywords. For example, if very many websites use the word “blue widget” to link to your website, it is likely that your website will get a high ranking on Google for the keyword “blue widget”.

How many keywords does Google consider?

It’s absolutely certain that Google considers the words in the links to your site. The question is, how many words or characters does Google count in a link? Is there an optimal length for text links? Blogger Shaun Anderson did a test to find the answer.

The test set-up

Shaun Anderson created a long text link with 50 nonsense words. Each of the nonsense words was 6 characters long. For example, he might have used a link like this:

wergsd woivsd mliwdc woiuby 3245sc plorxc werxcd …

Then he added that link to the home page of a website that has good rankings on Google.

After some time, Shaun did a search for a keyword that the linked website ranked number one for and added the nonsense words to the search. By doing so, Google would only list the site in the search results if links to the site contained the nonsense word.

For example, if a website has a number one ranking for “buy used cars in dallas” then the website will only be returned by Google for “buy used cars in dallas wergsd” if Google has indexed a link with the text “wergsd” that points to the website.

The result: the perfect length seems to be 55 characters

Out of the 50 words in the link text, Google counted eight. Everything after the eighth word was ignored. Eight words that consist of six characters make 48 characters. The seven spaces between these six words add up to a total of 55 characters.

What does this mean for your website?

You should make sure that the important keywords come in the first 55 characters of the links that point to your website.

As many websites use the title of a web page to link to it, you should also consider the way you write your web page titles. If your important keywords are at the beginning of your web page titles, chances are that these keywords will also be used in the links to your site.

If you want to know if your web page titles are correct and if you also want to know if all other elements of your web page are ready for a top 10 ranking on Google, you should analyze your website now.