Get Your "Link Juice" Join Mesa's Community of Blogs

Links are the currency of Google. In other words, they are the secret sauce that allows you to beat your competitors for rankings in Google. Sure, there are some other factors that Google uses to calculate rankings, but links by far are the most important aspect of dominating Google and in order to understand Google, you have to understand links.

Google looks at how sites link to each other to figure out which ones are the best. To show this in a way that’s understandable, let’s show a few examples. Let’s say that SMALL BUSINESS A and SMALL BUSINESS B are both doing business in Mesa and are selling “the same thing” and would both like to rank for “the same thing in Mesa, AZ”.

A B

Google is going to take a look at links to determine which of these two sites it will list first. At the most basic level, let’s say that Site A gets a link from a site that Site B doesn’t get:

C

A B

Site A now looks better to Google and will outrank Site B. Let's say that Site C decides to link to Site B, as well:

C C

A B

Now they both look the same to Google, who will now have to look at another ranking factor to determine which one is the best. There are other factors but none of them is nearly as important as the link factor.

Let’s add two new sites into the mix to further illustrate different scenarios that can happen:

C C

A B

D E
In the above example, we now have Site D linking to Site A and Site E linking to Site B. To figure out which site is better between Site A and Site B, Google will have to look at the sites that are linking to Site D and Site E:

C C

A B

D E

F

G

H

In the above example, Site D has more link juice than Site E because it’s getting links from Site F, Site G, and Site H. That means that Site A has more link juice than Site B. Site A will therefore outrank Site B.

Google is able to map out link relationships on an enormous scale and that’s what makes Google Google.

Get your "link juice" -- Join Mesa's Community of Blogs! Call today: Social Media for Small Businesses - Lonna 602-796-5341 or email Lonna@SMfSB.com