Relying on link quality indicators has the advantage for search engines to avoid the “noise” and improve results relevancy for specific queries. This is due to the complexity of manipulating a link profile, which can be done, but it is much more onerous and time consuming.

Multilingual Link Analysis Best Practice

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Resources

• Url of the page where the link is placed or to be place
• List of keywords that the site is targeting
• Google Toolbar to check page rank
• Several online tools that might help you in the analysis.

Steps (for each document / page )

1. Page Inspection
   
   • Title metatag (title of the page) . Review if the keywords are related to the site subject matter
   • Text surrounding the link. Search engines use a lot of semantic technology in their algorithm. That means that they are able to understand the relationship between themed keywords. That means that if the text surrounding the link has a little to do with the theme of the page linked that link will have less impact than conversely. Take a thorough look at the text around the link to spot semantic relationships
   • Check number of links on the page. The more links placed in a page the more diluted the page rank (the mark that Google gives to any page, it is easily checkable with Google Toolbar) will be.
   • Check the themes of the links. A page full of travel links will provide with better value to a travel site that an inventory of links of random topics (travel, gambling, sports, etc)
   • Link Location: is important. Ideal case scenario:
     • links headings, followed by relevant text.
     • links right at the start of paragraphs.
     • inks on a new line after the relevant paragraph.

Read the linking page content attentively.

Realistically speaking is difficult to force people to link to your page in these locations. Normally, links at the top of the page will me more prominent than at the bottom.

2. Anchor text Analysis

Anchor Text is the “Linked Text” Anchor text is the blue text that you click on, the actual words used to follow a hyperlink to another webpage.

Anchor text of the inbound link is one of the most concise assessments another page can use to determine your page theme. Anchor Text is still the single most important factor after title page. Ensure that the anchor text of the link contains keywords relevant for the page linked and that are present either in the destination title page or the copy of the page. For multilingual sites this is even more important since the language used to link to specific pages will help determine the geographic location of the linked content. It is very helpful when several languages are used under the same domain in different folders or subdomains.

Example:

Link in a page: luxury holidays in Spain

Title of the destination page: Luxury Holidays

3. Page Analysis
   • Links pointing to the page. It can be measured by page rank of the page showed in the Google Toolbar. Internal pages tend to have low page rank 0 or 1 but that doesn’t mean the link is not giving value. Obviously, the higher, the better
   • Links pointing to the whole site. Page rank 4 or 5 for commercial sites should be ok.
   • Domain listing in Dmoz. Dmoz is the most reputable directory on the web. Links from Dmoz carry a huge importance. A site with a link from Dmoz will give more linking value.

The relative importance and visibility of a webpage can be measured by several factors. A link in a page with good indicators will carry more value.

Tips & Warnings

• Gambling or porn sites linking to the client’s site might harm it
• Any link, regardless of the quality requisites stated, gives some value. Exception showed in the previous point.
• Links are difficult to get. Don’t discard a link just because it is not perfect, it might give the client’s traffic.

As we all should know the most relevant meta tags for search engines are the title tag, the description tag and the keywords tag. Although the value of this last one is bar to none for Google, other search engines might take it into account to determine relevancy for specific queries so it is always a good idea to include it, with the only  reservation of not spamming the hell out of it and focus on a few relevant keywords per page.

There are different best practices for international search engines than for Google. Some of them recommend a specific maximum title and description tag length, whereas others give you additional recommendations:

• Yandex.  Yandex ignores meta tags Revisit-After & Content. It is best practice not to use more than 25 words in the title tag and the maximum characters recommended for Meta Description are 200. For meta keywords & meta description tags  we should use only words that can be found in the body of the document. Like for Google, the most relevant HTML mark up tags are: keywords in <title>, (headings <h1> – <h6>), image signs (alt) and text of the document
• Baidu. Since one Chinese character accounts for 2 Latin letters the meta description characters maximum is half Google limit. Baidu explicitly recommends to restrain the count to  100 characters tops. The same character restriction is applicable for the other tags.
• For Yahoo Japan the recommended meta description tag length seems to be 150 characters.

Optimising for International Search Engines has different rules than optimising for Google. Although information retrieval science is based on very solid concepts, different algorithms and linguistic factors come into place when it comes down to different search engines. Be sure that you are aware of these differences before planning to expand your business in other country markets online.

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