Improving Linking Confidence

I am starting an “SEO Classics” category on SEO by the Sea for papers by Search Engineers or focusing on Information Retrieval or SEO practices. I have a category tag for some older posts. I will write newer posts for this category since I have come across documents that should become considered SEO Classics or cover Classic SEO topics.

One of my all-time favorite posts about Improving Linking Confidence between pages on the Web is a User Experience (UX) Classic from UIE.com called Getting Confidence From Lincoln.

This article tells us that visitors look for confidence about the anchor text in a link and how close that anchor text matches the content found on the other side of the association. Google does refer to confidence about facts and information on the Web, but it gets used a little differently here.

Confidence here means the likelihood that visitors will continue to follow links on a site as long as they have confidence in the topic found on the other side of that link. The word “confidence” appears in newer semantic content on the Web. It is something I focused on a lot in the post: Looking at Related Documents Titles and Anchor Text when Collecting Facts about an Entity. That post isn’t about Improving Linking Confidence directly. That post is about the confidence that those facts applied to a specific entity.

Building this kind of confidence into links or facts and entities and the connections between pages of a site can be an essential part of the structure of a page. They can determine how deeply a visitor might travel, which is crucial for improving linking confidence.

There is a list of SEO Classics and I will hopefully publish more of them soon.