Published:
Updated:
by Wayne Smith
Sitewide links were an aggressive SEO technique before 2005. Infoseek ranked pages based on the total number of links pointing toward a page; Google's PageRank patent was solely based on the importance of the page containing the link.
When pages are ranked only on links, only older pages and sites appear at the top of search results. In the early 2000s, Google rose to the third spot as a search engine, providing a third of the internet search traffic, after PageRank proved the best method for ranking links.
Google's rise from the 3rd spot was due, in part, to its fresh content algorithms.
Google started making some changes. They discounted sitewide links and began adding freshness algorithms to their search. CMS systems that powered other sites and used a sitewide "Powered by," link in the page footer stopped being promoted by Google, (as well as sites that used a sitewide "Designed by," link in the page footer).
The page header and footer are navigational intent zones.
Navigational menus or supplemental content and links in the header and footer are expected to be in these zones. Google uses these as a signal or co-factor to determine which pages are navigational.
Doing a "site:example.com" may or may not order the list of pages based on being found in the header and footer ... Co-factors include but are not limited to:
- How long has the link been in the header or footer?
- Are there resources on the category page that functionally make the page usable as a navigational page?
- Does the page have entity information about the site, terms of service, contact us, office locations, or content typically used in a navigational intent search query?
- Does the page have entity information for a product produced by the entity that owns the site?
I may disagree with the order of listed pages in a "site:example.com" search. I never agreed with the order when Google had the extension that showed PageRank. However, it was not a match for PageRank. However, it gives a way to look at how important Google considers the pages on a site to be—shaped by links and entity information, not relevancy.
PageRank data was never up to date; It depends on GoogleBot discovering all the links to all linking pages and updating the extension.
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