Click Here Considered Harmful

I just read an interesting article referenced in Sebastian Paquet's blog about the Google search engine, and I'm going to try to put its suggestions on how to improve your Google page rank into practice right away.

In the previous paragraph, I didn't say something like "To read the article, click here", with the link on "click here". That's something that I've often done in this blog in the past, and I'm really not sure why. I guess it's just a matter of my preferred writing style, or maybe I don't like the look of excessively long hyperlinks. Whatever the case, it's a practice that I'm going to try to avoid from now on, because it turns out that doing that reduces the value that Google's page rank associates with the link.

I thought I knew a fair amount about how Google's page rank system worked. From what I've read, it uses some techniques from mathematical graph theory that I studied when I was in college -- i.e., algorithms that can detect cyclical links in a graph, build a new graph with the cycles removed, and assign a hierarchy of values to the nodes in the resulting graph. (If you're not familiar with the terms of graph theory, all this means is what you probably already know: a link from a high-ranked page helps your page rank more than a link from a low-ranked page, and you can't fool Google by creating a lot of pages that all link to each other.) What I didn't know, however, is that the googlebots take link content into account in addition to the rank of the linking page. They do this in order to give more weight to a link that is referencing specific useful information within the linked-to page (as well as to try to give less weight to paid advertisement links). Come to think of it, this is a pretty smart thing for them to be doing.

The upshot is that if you really like a page and hope that more people will see it, you should write something more descriptive between your <a> and </a> tags, instead of just "click here". There's a lot more useful info about Google and more tips for increasing your page rank in the article. Some of the tips are quite counterintuitive, so it's probably worth a read.