Search Engine Optimization has become one of the key strategies in marketing yourself (your website) on the web.  Among one of the most important SEO strategies in the quest to the top of Google’s search rankings is building links to your site.  According to new media marketing expert, Chris Brogan, links act as “networks of value” to search engines such as Google.  With the multitude of links on the internet, Google assigns a value to each of them based on a number of characteristics which I won’t mention here.

All of these sites put together can be seen as a network of websites with the links being the ‘edges’ and the sites themselves being the ‘nodes’.  Each of these edges, according to Google, is a strong or weak tie (i.e., relevant or non-relevant link). With the goal of providing the highest value responses based on your search query, Google looks at the number of ties to and you’re your site as well as the strength of each tie. It then (in part) bases its search results on it.

Brogan also looks at links as “networks of thought”.  The internet as a whole and the links between websites provide a network of information. He says “Sometimes, you’re not the authority, but you are always in a position to thread up some articles, videos, and other resources to build out something of use to you”. In this way, even if a website isn’t providing information, it has the ability to share others’ information (through links), contributing to the ‘network of thought’.

Matt Cutts’ explanation of Google’s ‘valuation’ of links: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/text-links-and-pagerank/