Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Link Equity or Link Popularity

Your web page's link equity is a very significant factor that affects your placement in search engine result. Link popularity is another name for link equity and it refers to relevance of a web page by looking at its links. It's a mathematical method to calculate your online existence. Simply, a web page with more quality incoming links is more important then another web page with fewer incoming links. Incoming links refers to links that are coming from other websites to your web page. Quality of the incoming links is very important as not all incoming links are counted equal. In fact, the quality of incoming links counts more than the quantity.

Over time, your website will acquire many incoming links and search engines will give you better results. Thus, if you make changes to your website through some redesign or redevelopment, remember not to lose your link popularity. If you change your URL structure, you should utilize a 301-permanent-redirect to transfer the equity. Otherwise, you will lose search engine ranking equity, bookmark equity, and direct citation equity.

The 301 status code notifies the search engine that the resource has been "moved permanently" to a new location. It also tells search engines that the link equity from the previous URL should be credited to the new one, but in practice, it may take some time for this to occur. There are many ways to code this redirect, below there are php and .htaccess examples:

How to do a 301 Redirect with PHP:
[sourcecode language="php"]
<?php Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" ); Header( "Location: http://www.new-url.com" ); ?>
[/sourcecode]

How to do a 301 Redirect with .htaccess:

To Move a single page:
Redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.example.com/newpage.html

To change domain names:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^.*oldwebsite.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.preferredwebsite.net/$1 [R=301,L]

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