There has been a long asserted proposition within the SEO community that linking out to a highly trusted site actually helps in ranking. James tests out which has more benefit, linking to an authority site or one that has a lower authority and is less trusted? Do you really need a higher authority site to see movement or does it make no difference?
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This is from James Goldsmith. There's a couple things that bring this along is there is a theory that if you're dealing with the health sites/market that the sites that you're linking out to help establish your authority or the authoritativeness of the content that you're doing. There's some theories out there.
If you're using like a research paper, bibliography citations type stuff and linking to specific sets of sites that you could in fact increase the authoritativeness of your own page thus increasing your ranking versus someone that doesn't have it. James is going through and I've been talking to him in the back end about different types of sites to test.
In this case, Wikipedia was probably the most obvious one to start off with because everyone links to it in one form or another quite often. Especially when you're talking about linking to an authority site everyone just automatically clicks and thinks Wikipedia. So, why not test that one off first. Then, he's going to go on into testing other websites and more specifically website categories.
So, there's linking to a Google News site. Will that result in an improvement or drop in rankings if the site is in Google News? If the site is listed in Google Scholar does that give it more authority and will that help you if you're linking to it which is a little bit easier than doing if I link to Wikipedia.
What if I link to Amazon? What if I link to x y & z? James could go on indefinitely testing various sites and seeing which ones would get more power but then you get into topics and topic relevance and etc. I think it will be a little bit more convoluted after that point.
I think we're on the right track and check. In particular, I'd be interested to see his results when he gets into the Google Scholar section and linking to those and linking the various parts of the Google Scholar catalog to see the results.
With that said he each page was submitted for indexing. He left five days before he created a link or added a link to the page ranking in the middle and again he linked out to Wikipedia. Then, there's where he linked ~ my wiki. Let's keep going and this is Wikipedia and I'm skipping this because you guys can read it yourselves, right.
So, the URL indexed is #3 and then no movement yet on the 13th. Moved up to position #2 and then stuck at position #2 and then jump to #1. Because of how he used his links... I'll show you this Anywiki link thing. Let's scroll back up here real quick. The Anywiki link thing is on every one of them. So, all the pages had a link, right?
Then, the test page had the Wiki link and you noticed he was smart. He didn't use keywords so he didn't change... He might have changed the keyword density a little bit... Look at the specifications and talk to him on it but I'm going to go with he didn't change it enough to make that significant even if he did not add a word to balance that out. But since there's a word for word the keyword density is the same and I'm going to go with that. Ultimately, it ended up boosting the page a few days later on the 17th.
A couple things that I want to point out when I see these in a while. I have done some Wikipedia tests like this in the real world and actually tank sites by linking out to Wikipedia. So, it could have been the specific word that I linked, the specific page that I linked out to you that caused the over optimization or it could have been a Google bounce and I just didn't wait long enough.
This is a long time ago so this is definitely a test you guys should be trying to repeat and then testing it in a while to maybe a couple of your live test sites just to see if it's repeatable and it's consistent.
For the most part, I think everyone is linking to the Wikipedia page and it is boosting up so again it could be something there. I guess, if you're in the market and you don't have a lot of stuff in Google Scholar, for example, but there is a lot of listings in Wikipedia you should be leveraging that at least as a minimum to get a couple outbound links in there and just justify why you have your content, etc. So, there's that and that's test 382.