In the past, one of the premier indicators of a website’s authority has been the presence of a large number of backlinks pointing towards that site. The rationale is simple. If you’re a good site, people will link to you, generally to share with their followers or to cite you as a valuable resource. Therefore, measuring links is an indirect way to measure the quality of a site.
In a perfect world, this would be perfectly fine and acceptable. Unfortunately, this isn’t a perfect world. In the world we live in, webmasters ruin everything.
In this case, the entire concept of using links as a quality indicator has been corrupted. There’s no way to verify whether a link was added because a user genuinely likes the content on the other end, or whether the owner of that content paid for the link, or they paid for the post, or the link wasn’t posted by the owner of the originating site, etc. There are a dozen different “black hat” ways that the quality of a link is corrupted, and that makes links much less valuable all around.
Oh, links were still valuable for a long time. They’re still valuable today, albeit much less. The end result is just a decline in the value of any given link. You know why so many people still focus on .edu and .gov links? Because those domains are typically run by educational and governmental establishments, which are much harder to bribe to put links on.
Implied Links
A while back, Google filed a particular patent that set the SEO world on speculative fire. Everyone was trying to guess when and where it would be implemented. These days, general consensus seems to be that it’s a part of Panda, albeit a smaller part than many suspected from the outset.
This patent gives Google a method for identifying implied links via brand mentions. The idea is, if I mention that I like Moz.com, but I don’t link to their domain, there’s no way for Moz to benefit from that. At least, there’s no measurable way. My comment might influence someone who reads this post, and that someone might later see Moz and decide it’s a little more trustworthy than they initially suspected, but that’s hardly traceable.
With implied links, Google can see that I mentioned Moz – or whoever – and tie that into Moz’s search ranking. “Wow, a lot of people are saying they like Moz, more than the number of links would indicate. Let’s boost their search relevance.”
For big sites, like Moz, this will hardly have an impact. They’re already dominating their niche, they don’t really need the help. However, implied links can work the other way as well.
For example, Google might take a look at a site and see that they have a heck of a lot of incoming links from some domains that are, while not implicitly bad, are skirting the line of reasonable quality. Google then does some investigation, and finds that the linked site’s brand has virtually no mentions elsewhere on the Internet. No one is talking about them, let alone in a positive light. Even the sites linking to them are just linking, not mentioning.
Google can take a look at that evidence and decide that the links pointing to the linked site aren’t necessarily all that valuable. Essentially, the implied links work as a quality control mechanism for actual links, to help filter out the black hats.
This is going to be increasingly important moving forward, as Google gets better at sorting out the whole semantic meaning behind a post, better at ranking the quality of information on a site, and better at filtering out black hat spam techniques relying on the machine nature of the algorithm.
Taking Advantage of Implied Links
With any new development in SEO, it’s a good idea to get in on it before it gets corrupted by webmasters who, as mentioned earlier, ruin everything.
As I said before, implied links are mentions of your brand name or your website that are not connected to a link. Think of them sort of like branded keywords that, when used on other sites, benefit your site.
The one unfortunate aspect of implied links is that there’s very little way to track their effect. It’s hard to monitor your brand mentions throughout the entire web, and it’s hard to measure their direct impact on your site.
- For now, don’t abandon traditional link building. Legitimate links, earned links, are still valuable. As long as the source of the link is a quality site, the link will very likely benefit you. Even a nofollowed link might count as an implied link, moving forward. That said, the link also needs to be from relevant content to relevant content.
- Work on expanding your reputation. Do this with an emphasis on your brand name. Try to get people to refer to you by your brand name when they mention you. When you post on other sites, use your brand name – even without a link – in author bios and similar fields.
- Work to satisfy your users. The more people like you and your brand, the more they will talk about you. In a very real sense, building implied links is just like building word of mouth. You’ll gain benefits when people talk about you, even if they don’t link to you.
- Don’t stress out over nofollowed links. They don’t pass link equity, but they could potentially pass implied link equity. Right now, there’s no way to tell whether they do or not. It’s also possible that their value may go up over time, as Google adjusts the weight of both links and mentions.
It’s certain that Google is looking to use mentions as a factor of authority. What’s not certain is how effective they are, how they will change in the coming year, and how you can best take advantage of their presence.
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