Link popularity & the bowtie theory revisited

• Apr. 8, 2003

Back in June, 2000 we presented an article to you from a researcher at Planet Ocean Communications.  As many experienced SEO’s are aware, Planet Ocean is the source for new ideas and solutions to everyday SEO problems.

 

They presented an article called “Link Popularity and the Bowtie Theory” which outlines how there is a core of highly interlinked sites which form the basis for the world wide web and that virtually all other sites link to or from these sites, resembling a large bowtie.  Any which don’t have direct links to or from this core are not considered part of the bowtie.

 

This was likely the first time anyone ever heard the term “link popularity” or “link relevancy.”  These terms, as you’re probably well aware, are the new catch phrases of SEO.  In essence the article described a way of ranking pages in search engine by counting the number of incoming and outgoing links from a particular site, and using that count as a variable in determining the site’s overall relevancy to a search term, and the web in general.

 

They further surmised that Altavista was the first major engine at the time to be doing this and the then little known Google was also likely using links as a qualifier for relevance.

 

Flash forward almost three years and virtually any SEO will tell you that incoming and outgoing links will definitely affect your rankings, especially in highly competitive markets.  The only differences being that Google is now the driving force behind the web and that the number of outgoing links can (but doesn’t always) reduce your overall link popularity (which Google terms PageRank).

 

We have written many articles on the importance of link building and have shown you that in some cases outgoing links can influence your PageRank down, just as unrelated incoming links can influence your PageRank down as well.

 

Although no one really knows for sure (other than Google techies) what the actual influences are for incoming and outgoing links, we can make some assumptions.  Based on the original paper published by Google founders Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine", and our own research and article explaining Google PageRank we can start to understand how PageRank works, how it affects your search engine rankings, and how it all relates to the Bowtie Theory of the web.

 

Basically, the paper states that the web can efficiently and accurately be crawled and indexed using a combination of on-the-page factors in association with variables such as PageRank to determine a web pages (or websites) overall importance to the web.  The number of high quality incoming links (like the left side of a bowtie) can influence the PageRank up, while a large number of outgoing links (much like the right side of the bowtie) can, but doesn’t always, influence your PageRank down.  The number of outgoing links doesn’t appear to affect PageRank on larger sites such as Yahoo!, CNN, MSN and so on.

 

By using this theory, we should then be able to develop an effective linking strategy which will allow your site to gain maximum benefit from its incoming high quality links, will limiting the affect of the outgoing links.

 

We are also seeing this type of ranking system, where links to and from the site affect the sites overall ranking, happening in other engines such as Alltheweb and Inktomi.  Although Google has appeared to refine the PageRank algorithm somewhat since the idea was first developed, it still uses on-the-page factors in association with PageRank to determine final ranking value.

 

As you can see, this Bowtie theory which was presented almost three years ago still has some merit when considering modern search engines.  There is still a core of highly visited, relevant sites whose incoming and outgoing links affect each other as well as the bows of the bowtie surrounding them.

 

Rob Sullivan

Searchengineposition.com

Search Engine Positioning

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