Craft Focus - Dec/Jan (Issue 70)

106 craft focus Search engines like Google use several different ranking factors to determine where to place pages in search results. These ranking factors can number into the hundreds (in Google’s case), but roughly speaking, the criteria fall into three main areas: on-site factors, off-site factors and the hosting environment. Traditionally, the biggest influence in rankings for Google has been the off-site factors, including links coming into a target website from other websites. These external links have been the core of Google’s ranking algorithm since Larry Page (one of Google’s two founders) proposed the use of external link signals in 1996. The resulting PageRank algorithm, named after Page, is still at the core of the Google search engine, and there’s no reason to think that external links are going to be replaced anytime soon. So external links are important. This creates a potential problem for those wishing to get a brand-new website but also a worthwhile opportunity for those looking to recover from past mistakes. Lost links? If you’ve ever been in the unfortunate situation where you’ve got a new website and then immediately lost search engine David Fairhurst explains how to claim back what is rightfully yours historical link reclamation