Google Page Rank and the Hilltop Algorithm

Here is something to think about... as discussed in this article several months ago, Google's Page Rank likely means little as of November 2003 - at least to all sites that compete for the competitive keywords that were affected by last November's Florida update and the updates that followed which added even more keywords to the list.

A consensus has been pretty much reached in the SEO forums that sites affected are now being ranked by a variation of the Hilltop Algorithm and the rules for linking for maximum benefit are different.

When linking to try and raise Page Rank it does not matter what the topic of the page where the link comes from is. What matters is the Page Rank of the page and the number of outgoing links on that page. Since the Page Rank that would be passed on to your site is roughly the Page Rank of the page divided by the number of outgoing links - ideally you would look for a page with high Page Rank and the link to your site would be the only link out.

Hilltop on the other hand is topic sensitive so for starters you want your links to be on pages either about real estate or your market area at the least and ideally about real estate in your actual market area. Unlike Page Rank though, if your link out is the only link on the page it will not help you at all.

Hilltop looks for "Expert Documents" - that are about certain topics and have links out to many non-affiliated pages. So, if there are only a couple of links out the page would fail to be recognized as an "Expert Document" and your link would not be helping you. So, ideally you would be looking for your link to be placed on a page with many other real estate links.

Hilltop checks that the outgoing links on the host page all share the same broad topic classification and reject those pages that do not. This allows them to distinguish between random collections of links and pages that are a resource on the topic. So, free for all links pages are of no benefit and a link from a non real estate site's broad link collection is of no help either.

Just one more thing to look for when exchanging links :)