Why should what pages linking to you be so important? Perhaps it’s because it’s the part of SEO I find most challenging, or perhaps it’s because from a holistic point of view counting how many pages that linked to you as a factor of importance doesn’t make sense. Whatever the reason; in my opinion the days of using link building as a search engine optimization tool are numbered.
The emphasis on pages linking to you and their page rank, which is based on who links to them; does not make any sense. Linking to sites or having them link to you, even with the use of anchor text does not make sense as a “vote of confidence”. It goes against a holistic approach whereby the user experience is front and center. Using who links to you as a vote of confidence is like optimizing for the search engines and not the people who are actually using the search engines, the users. This goes totally against Google’s own goal of providing the best user experience possible.
Think about it for a second. Web content is created for the user so it makes sense that they have a vote in whether or not a page has any authority. Links, which can be created artificially, should not be seen as a vote of confidence in a page’s authority; the user should have the vote of confidence.
If a user has found your page through searching and arrives only to find you don’t have what they want they will click and get away from your site to a site which does have what they want. Google should start to look at this as a vote against the site. Get enough users exiting stage right and Google should start to wonder if the site has any valid content. The higher the bounce rate and the faster the pages should drop in the search results.
Google has the ability to analyze a page’s worth based purely on user habits. If a user exits by hitting the back button or closing the tab, that is one statistic. Others include how long the user has stayed on that page; did they click through to any other pages or perhaps the user clicked through to another site through a link. But the most important stat they should look at is how fast someone exits a site. They should look at this exit data a little more than I believe they currently do.
Over time this exit data will create an accurate barometer called ‘bounce factor’ for each page. A site’s bounce factor should be the biggest indicator of a site’s popularity. High enough bounce rate and it means you don’t have good content and are offering a “bad” user experience. If you have good quality content then people will stick around and your bounce rate will go down. Sites with good content will then be rewarded with both lower bounce rates and potentially better search rankings. Slowly this should become a very compelling factor in determining search engine ranking.
It’s time for a revolution people, let’s put the vote back into the hands of real people who benefit from the search results, not in an ethereal vote from phantom sites.
Tags:
content,
Google PageRank,
linking,
SEO 
