Canonical links.

1. Most SE's weights inbound links. Link spamming is a well known concept.
2. Some SE's like Teoma, http://www.teoma.com/ use expert links. Expert links is about outgoing links.
3. Some say, you are who you link to, but you also are who links to you. If you have a too open mind, people will start throwing garbage at you. Teoma adds a new dimension and level of authority to search results through its approach, known as Subject-Specific PopularitySM.

"Subject-Specific Popularity analyzes the relationship of sites within a community, ranking a site based on the number of same-subject pages that reference it, among hundreds of other criteria. In other words, Teoma determines the best answer for a search by asking experts within a specific subject community about who they believe is the best resource for that subject. By assessing the opinions of a site's peers, Teoma establishes authority for the search result. Relevant search results ranked by Subject-Specific Popularity are presented under the heading "Results" on the Teoma.com results page".
http://sp.teoma.com/docs/teoma/about/searchwithauthority.html

There was one first site on the web, and this was then the most important. As a new site were introduced, the possibility for links between these sites were open. How should we measure the importance of the tow sites
1. When there were no links between the sites?
2. When links were introduced?

Does importance mean the number of surfers (hours used) to (on) the two sites, or should experts vote for their relevance? When the number of sites increases, the number of links increases to infinity. There is a possibility of oubound and inbound links, and some outbound links is more or less relevant. The same may apply to the number of inbound links. Is a newspaper more important on a subject than an expert journal (magazine) because of more inbound links to the newspaper?

If you know principal component analysis and canonical correlation, ti shoud not be difficult to find links on a site, that gives real value to the site, what we will call canonical links. These links, may in the spirit of Teoma be bouth inbound and outbound.

Headake: Is the concept of linking inflated? Is it possible to concentrate on other factors than links, to measure the rank of a site? This discussion
will never end as long as there are ranking algorithms, SE's and surfers on the internet.


Related articles:
http://seoarticles.seoforgoogle.com/Why-You-Need-Outbound-Links.cfm
http://pr.efactory.de/e-outbound-links.shtml

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Kjell Gunnar Bleivik