Recapped: Google’s Link Week

Google’s Maihle Ohye surprised the staying-at-home-from-SMX-East-‘ers earlier this week (in a good way) by announcing a series on links on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog. She started with discussing internal link architecture, followed by outbound links and last but not least a post about inbound links. It’s good to see a few detailed posts from Google about this subject and it’s fun trying to read through the lines. So, what can these three posts teach you about how Google might think about links?

Internal linking:

When Google says that ‘breadcrumbs help users to understand where they are‘ in a post about links, it means that Google really wants you to implement breadcrumbs to help them index and rank your site properly. Luckily, any good internal link structure includes breadcrumbs, because of their Freedom Anchor Text.

Anchor Text mattered a lot yesterday, it matters a lot today and it will matter a lot in the future. While some say that ‘they’ve seen a decrease in the importance of anchor text’, when Google repeatedly says that ‘descriptive anchor text is important‘, they mean it.

Linking out:

‘Thoughtful outbound links can help your credibility.‘ Not only is this true for visitors, but I also believe that linking out to reputable sources on a regular basis is way better than trying to do your utmost to ‘prevent PageRank leaks’. And I know I’m not the only one.

Inbound links:

Ok, this last post was quite a bit disappointing. While the subject (links) was apparently worth it to spend an entire week on, Maile Ohye did her best to let the readers think that inbound links aren’t that important. The line ‘Have other relevant sites link to you‘ disappeared from Google’s Webmaster Guidelines earlier this month, so it looks like they’re covering up the small amount of information they’ve shared on this subject.