How graph theory relates to your links looking unnatural to Google
When I blogged earlier this month about some things Matt Cutts from Google had to say about linking, I mentioned something called "cliques" from graph theory. Let me elaborate on this further...
I don't want to bore you all with Graph Theory (although if you're interested, you could read up on it in Wikipedia), so I'll cut to the chase. Simply look at the figure on the right taken on Wikipedia's clique definition page and you'll see that all 5 nodes (these are the signified as red dots and they can also be referred to as vertices) are all "linking" to all 4 of their neighboring nodes. They never miss a link. It all looks so perfect, doesn't it! Naturally occurring neighborhoods on the Web aren't perfect like that. If it looks perfect, it's been engineered. Google will be suspect to unnatural-looking neighborhoods.
So if you own a stable of web sites, think twice about linking every one of these websites to each other in a completely symmetrical fashion.
3 comments, 1 pingback
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Hi Stephan,
I was reading this, and your posts on Jill's forum.
Let me be anal and ask you about two situations, will you?
If I have 20 sites (different companies/clients, but the same theme) and all 20 of them have homepage links to the others, as well as homepage links to quite a few other sites that are not mine, but again tend to interlink....is that a clique?
But what if the 20 websites link to one particular site, and it doesn't link back to maybe half of them?
Has anyone ever really gotten a tried and true answer about having recip homepage links? I've heard it wasn't good, but we've been doing it for years and Google doesn't seem to mind a bit.
JanComment by Jan [Visitor]
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09/16/05 @ 22:28
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PS...to clarify one thing...neither myself nor any of my partners/friends do sitewide linking. We stopped that a LONG time ago. We only link our homepages, and some of them are one-ways.
JanComment by Jan [Visitor]
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09/16/05 @ 22:30
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The theory is just that, a theory. Google doesn't measure up anything like that in reality.
Comment by Mathey Wormsely [Visitor]
· http://www.ntl.co.uk —
10/03/05 @ 06:23
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[...] For example, your backlinks need to represent a range of importance scores (PageRank) so that Google doesn’t construe your link network as unnatural. Building links exclusively or mostly from high PageRank endowed sites may flag your site for artificially trying to boost your PageRank. And do you really want to attract additional scrutiny? [...]
Pingback by Your link building strategy, PageRank, and other pieces of the linking puzzle @ Scatterings [Visitor] — 07/12/06 @ 17:50
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