
07-01-2009, 08:52 AM
Google was the first to acknowledge a link from one site to another as an important component in determining a site's value. Prior to this, a website could just stick whatever they wanted in the meta and content areas of their site to get ranked high in search engines. The basic idea is that if another site links to yours, it is counted as a vote. Over the years, as webmasters and marketers learned to use this information to their benefit, Google has changed how they calculate page rank: including the page rank of the site the link is originating from, the relevancy of the site to yours, the amount of links both sites have, how often the content changes, and so on. There are many such variables that can change in weight and new variables can be added -- this causes the change in algorithm that was discussed in an earlier post.