We know how much Google depends on external links for assigning some value to a site and a page. And because we all know that, backlink building has been much abused – so that it is no more that easy to define when people are linking for merit and when they are linking for some other reasons.
That being said, it is quite logical to assume that Google might be using some other external factors to make judgments how valuable the site is. Apart from much discussed brand authority, is it possible that there is some type of “virtual” backlink (and by “virtual” I don’t mean that it doesn’t really exist – what I mean is that it is not what we are used to mean by “direct” backlink you can click to land on the destination page).
For example, by using an image hosted on another domain, do we show Google that we are “borrowing” that image giving thus Google another signal of that site “usefulness”? (Remember our last year’s discussion on whether hotlinking may be any positive signal at all?) Or can any of the previously discussed page discovery methods also serve as a “virtual link” signaling about the referred site quality?
A short WebmasterWorld thread mentions the related observations and assumptions: Quoting the administrator,
At PubCon Austin I had the chance to discuss this with Matt Cutts – specifically in the context of Googlebot crawling urls found through form submission. In such situations, Google adds a “virtual link” to the web graph – and it is then active in various kinds of link juice calculation.
Have you ever noticed the effect of “virtual” links on your site performance? Please share your thoughts!
Though interesting, I don’t believe “form links” would count as a ranking factor. Using hotlinks for page ranking is kind of clever, but maybe, not really meaningful…
I agree with Frank when you talk about image hotlinks. I think this is another factor but I think it is not a hard signal as “non-virtual” backlinks.
I definitely think they do this. There are tons of cues you could use to pass authority from one website to another. Google’s ‘brand update’ hints to this. How do they establish what exactly a brand is vs. just another website? A mention of a brand can act as a “virtual backlink” for sure.
As defined here, yes I’ve benefited from virtual links. I wrote numerous posts for a once extremely popular site, A, where I could not post diagrams/ screen snaps. So I had one of my own domains where I posted the images. My domain’s site, B, only has a few articles, but possibly because of the virtual links from A to images on B (but not visible on site B), and because of the numerous links to my articles on site A from other places, I seem to benefit from a little extra traffic than I’d have thought (though nothing really significant).
Yes, that seems to be a logic factor. I have seen this by the process of indexing images. If images get linked they got some points in ranking in the google image search. But if this counts like a recommendation for the page or the whole site.. no idea.