December 7, 2020 | 7 min read
Compliance with modern search algorithms is important. Link relevancy is so important that Google began specifying the link attribute no follow to collect more link signals. The reason for this was to add more correlation signals to be analyzed in terms of relevance.
Links contribute to page ranking. They are still working. But inappropriate links can have unwanted consequences.
Scholarship linking is a grant award practice to attract links from scholarship websites.
Some people base the strategy on the fact that it is a good way to build goodwill in society. Good intentions are a good thing, and if so, then adding these links to no follow is good practice.
In terms of rankings, the correlation is similar to voting. The more links a site receives, the more likely it is that the site will be considered expert, credible and trustworthy.
The link to the grant reference can be considered as a vote. For ranking purposes, this is a link to scholarships, not a vote on a major subject.
A link from a scholarship reference may be relevant if that link is to the scholarship main page of the site where the scholarship is offered. it's convenient.
A link to a scholarship that leads to the home page of the site or an important page on your topic is irrelevant. This is an inappropriate link and may be subject to consumption.
The appropriate link flag indicates the search engine to which the page links. Therefore, the purpose of creating a link should be to get a link from a website related to the topic to which they are related.
Ideally, the link between the linked webpage and the page receiving the link should be on a topic close to that site. For example, this means that the best link to a personal injury lawyer is a link to a website related to the car accident or to the lawyer after the car accident.
This is the link gold standard. The lowest and least relevant links are either truncated.
This may sound inconsistent, but the worst case scenario is that inappropriate links are listed.
Since 2003, at a search engine strategy conference in San Jose, a Google employee named Marissa Meyer (the future CEO of Yahoo) said that that Google depreciated the PageRank from irrelevant pages.
This was a revolutionary approach in 2003. I haven't heard that Google could reduce the value of links because of its context.
So after her speech at the question and answer session, I asked an additional question about PageRank depreciation, such as the example of a web design link "powered by" in the footer of an inclusive web page.
She replied that a link from an unrelated page, such as a link to a site run by a "college", would not pass the link flag to the web design page because the link was irrelevant. He said the college's website for the study does not belong to a web design company.
This 2003 comment was intriguing, and many of my colleagues at the time scoffed at the idea that Google might understand the connection between the links.
However, the evidence appeared everywhere in 2003, when PageRank values were displayed on the Google Toolbar at the time, and it was easy to see the effects of links from powerful PageRank links.
An important consideration is that since 2003, Google has been able to understand that the context of links can determine whether and to what extent page ranking systems have been omitted.
Here's the bad news about the scholarship link. The bad scholarship link is that the context of the link can be relevant if the links point to a scholarship page, but not the way companies expect.
This is an example:
Bad results: Some sites receive so many links from scholarship links that they can change links to other sections of the site, allowing Google to view the site's scholarship page as an important part of the site.
Google's algorithm determines which pages are important parts of your site. In my opinion, there is a set of inbound links and is well visible as a page link, such as site navigation.
For example, hosting a scholarship and finding a link to a scholarship page while on the site will prevent the scholarship linking page from appearing in ten packages without explicitly referring to that page.
But, in my opinion, maintaining a scholarship out of ten sets does not solve any problem. The problem is that the site comes with links that tell Google that part of the site is associated with scholarships.
Do you think it is desirable if your site is related to the laws of personal injury, dentistry, plastic surgery or the topic of your site?
One of the oldest SEO myths is that Dot EDU links have extra power this is not true. There was a time when links to point EDU sites could be beneficial, but Google better understood the context of the links and decided whether to set PageRank or block it.
Google creates a web map with a link chart. Link charts can be separated by topic to give these links more meaning. This is called the following correlation graph. A mini-link chart is an arrangement of links by topic, removing links from ideas such as advertising and navigation, then using the remainder to calculate the relevance of the topic.
The purpose of understanding link chart is to gain a better understanding of link ranking and ranking. This will make you more resistant to linking myths about the confusion about how powerful EDUs are in points.
And if you need to hear it from a Google employee (which is good!), John Muller posted a "misconception" about the value of the .edu link on Twitter.
Scholarship links can help you organize your scholarship terms as directed. But this can be considered a negative result if your site is not associated with scholarships.
The ideal is to get links related to your topic to improve Google's understanding of your site. Scholarship links fail in this regard because the link reference is for the scholarship and not for the main one.
Some domains may deviate from the myth of authority and trust. But Google doesn't use any kind of "power point" to get sites to behave as usual. Typical sites are sites that link to relevant pages. In short, trusted and unreliable sites are not associated with spam and links in the regular scheme.
As Müeller pointed out, Dot EDU is a misconception of relationships, and it continues to think about the authority and trust of the domain. You can also read what John Mueller said about domain authority: John Mueller rejected the idea that Google uses the domain authority flag.
In my opinion, scholarship linking is a clearly unsuccessful linking strategy for all the reasons mentioned in this article.
Link building is a complex strategy that requires a lot of effort with little benefit and very much rejection. Therefore, scholarships are a strategy like networking because they are easy to do. But the simplest doesn't mean it will help organize your site.
Deleting links is a way to tell Google which links to ignore.
In a recent Twitter poll, the majority of respondents in the research community did not vote and supported the retention of scientific links. I agree. If your site isn't manually approved, it's best to leave it and focus on creating good content and other beneficial advertising activities.
This question is difficult to answer. My view on this topic is that I do not recommend it and many notable search marketers who have a link agree with me. However, there are many other significant markets that believe that practice has value.
If this is done for altruistic reasons, then continue. It's good to help people.
But there may be a desire to avoid the collapse of an inappropriate relationship. Scholarship providers should consider adding the no follow attribute to any link to avoid links that negatively affect classification.
Inappropriate links can make a site more of a scholarship and less of everything related to your business, especially if the company gets those and less relevant links.
In my opinion, the site could be sanctioned manually due to over-correction and with a very improved anchor text.
There are several reasons why a scholarship link is not created for ranking purposes. SEO myths should be fought to justify this action for link building purposes.
A good argument could be to award scholarships for other purposes to raise awareness. In this case, it may make sense for the link to require no follows.
But this article focuses only on the practice of awarding scholarships to influence ratings.
However, Google's algorithm works like a black box because no one knows exactly what's going on. We can only do our best to explore and evaluate a variety of ideas, especially based on the views and knowledge of Google employees through the reading of patents and research papers. There are many views on this subject, and I respect that there will be differences.
In the absence of clear Google guidelines, this is a topic that is not considered a zero-sum game where everyone has to be wrong to be true. This can be a good way to tolerate differences of opinion and be open.
Who is your target? How will you get traffic? What will the traffic do once they are there? Is your site mobile friendly? All of these play a part in the success of a website.
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