A serious SKA question for AtW

[HairyArsedBloke]

On StatCounter I get an Ad for 1,000 backlinks for $9.99.

Now I know why and all that, but what I am wondering is how SKA treats them. Does it treat them in the same way as all the other links in your database including those to pages that no longer exists?

[AtW]

SKA remembers outgoing links found on crawled pages and tries to follow them at later date - some links might redirect to another location (tinyurl.com is good example), sometimes (especially with ads) it is not possible to follow them due to robots.txt restrictions.

[HairyArsedBloke]

So there is difference between legit and bogus backlinks?

[AtW]

So there is difference between legit and bogus backlinks?

What do you mean by "bonus"?

Backlink is a backlink - some come from less important sites, some from more: SKA can see that reasonably well.

Human analysis can pick up a lot of other stuff such as quality of site, whether it looks like paid link or not etc.

[OwlHoot]

SKA remembers outgoing links found on crawled pages and tries to follow them at later date - some links might redirect to another location (tinyurl.com is good example), sometimes (especially with ads) it is not possible to follow them due to robots.txt restrictions.

Sounds like web crawling has some similarities to disassembling. That's another situation where one has to trawl through jump and call "links", and defer these for later examination.

[d000hg]

I think HAB is talking about link-farming, and the answer is SKA doesn't try to treat them specially or detect such things? Doesn't Google try to detect where several sites all link a lot to each other, and discount the importance of those links? You rarely seem to get spam sites coming top in Google searches so I assume they use heuristics and other algorithms to try and detect this stuff.

[AtW]

I think HAB is talking about link-farming, and the answer is SKA doesn't try to treat them specially or detect such things?

SKA shows data "as found" with a few additional metrics that allow human analyst to decide if this link is indeed valuable or not.

In the near future we'll be adding more metrics to help reach such decision quicker.