SEO Voting

What happens when you click on a search engine result?

Consider the concept of voting. You really only can vote for one thing, with one vote. When a decision has to be made, you generally do not have the option to vote for both options or all of the above. This is because a vote for more than one of the options would skew the overall vote, and would in essence, weaken your votes from a full vote, to half-votes or less. In regards to search engines, every web page has a vote. How that vote is used affects not just the item or topic being voted on, but also that web page.

If you have a web page which is called thebest.html which raves about the best internet marketing blog, the links which that page points to are considered as votes made by that page. So, if the thebest.html page has two links to two different internet marketing blogs, then consider the vote split, and each vote from that page is actually a half-vote, because every web page only has one vote. If that web page which is raving about internet search blogs links to a dozen different blogs, each vote is weakened even further! However, if the entire page only has a single external link, which points to some amazing internet marketing blog, then the vote made by that page, as far as organic search engines are concerned, holds more value, and is not as watered down.

From a usability perspective, a site or web page which has an excessive amount of links on it may have its uses, but will most likely be a cluttered mess. Sure it is possible to list links in a clean fashion, but chances are, if you are going to put that much effort into the page design, you will probably be more selective as to the content you are posting.

This concept of a single vote for a single page holds true, regardless of how popular that page is or is not. Perhaps later we can discuss factors which cause some votes to hold higher sway over others.