Links rule the Internet. Links bring traffic, links bring popularity, links bring high ranking, and most importantly -- links bring money. Everyday webmasters, promoters and marketers send out tons of emails asking for links, hundreds of companies and thousands of individuals make their living by link building. But what is behind all this hype? Why in the last five years links became such important factor for the success of an online business?

Everyone knows or at least has heard of PageRank -- the most widely used Link Analysis Algorithm. PageRank has proven itself as a powerful measure to identify important resources in the Web and since 1998 it is the backbone of the most successful search engine -- Google.com. Instead of traditional information retrieval technique, page content analysis, which was used by the majority of search engines in the late 1990s, PageRank takes the advantage of the interlinked nature of the Web. It was discovered that hypertext link could serve the same purpose as citations in the academic world. The more people cite your document, the more important it becomes. The same is true for web pages. The effectiveness of the new approach turned out to be beyond expectations, and shortly afterwards Google has transformed itself from a modest university research project into the biggest search engine and a multi-billion corporation.

The advent of links as a ranking factor has killed the traditional SEO. Page content optimization importance has sunk tremendously while new strategies of website promotion have been brought into the limelight. Link exchange, reciprocal links, link directories, link farms, three-way linking -- all these approaches came into use to answer the search engines shifting to the link ranking algorithms. Sometimes people use these techniques without a clear understanding of what is behind them. Sites get penalized; people waste their time and money -- all because of insufficient knowledge. What is a link analysis algorithm? What algorithms are in use? Which factors are important and what are their weights?

It is impossible to create an effective link building strategy without knowing the answers to these questions. To understand the logic of link analysis algorithms, you have to make yourself familiar with the topic. A great number of research papers on information retrieval are available in the Internet but it would take too much of your time to find and identify which of them are important and relevant. At SEOResearcher.com I collect and summarize the most prominent works on Link Analysis Algorithms as well as on other related topics. Among the recent additions, you will find descriptions of the first link ranking algorithm, InDegree, and later developments, PageRank, HITS, topic sensitive PageRank and Authority Threshold algorithms. In articles discussing the shortcomings of link ranking approach you will find an answer to a question -- why it takes so much time for a new site to get enough link to make its way into the top-ten of search results? Or what are the perspectives of the semantic markup in HTML links? Or what is the optimal balance between website outlook, content and business goals? Knowledge always pays off, knowledge is always a competitive advantage and especially in the Internet - the medium born in college labs.

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About the author:
Oleg Ishenko, Berlin, Germany. BSc in Telecommunications Industry Business Management. Master student in Humboldt University Berlin. MCSE and MCDBA certifications. Overall 8 years of experience in IT and business management. SEO Researcher