From the course: SEO Strategy: Link Building
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Why links became such a strong ranking signal
From the course: SEO Strategy: Link Building
Why links became such a strong ranking signal
- In the late 90s, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were at Stanford University building what would eventually become Google. At the time, search engines such as Yahoo, Like Us, and Alta Vista, were growing in popularity, but the two students wanted to build something better. Links between pages were well known as a potential ranking signal, but Page made a breakthrough when thinking about citations that were used on university papers. He realized that the more a certain source such as another paper, a book, or professor was cited, the more likely it was that they were a credible source. Otherwise, why would students cite them so often? Page took this principle and applied it to the Web, thinking that the more a webpage was linked to by someone else, the more credible it was likely to be. The thing is, he went further, and started to try and use this information to calculate a score of each page which was based on the number…
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