Comments on: Go Away = Come Back http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2008/09/17/go-away-come-back/ What's Hot & What's Cooking in Scholarly Publishing - from the Society for Scholarly Publishing Thu, 16 Feb 2012 03:31:36 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Philip Davis http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2008/09/17/go-away-come-back/#comment-874 Wed, 17 Sep 2008 12:56:26 +0000 http://scholarlykitchen.wordpress.com/?p=1075#comment-874 Kent,
Outlinks (that is, a link from your site to another) performs a functional purpose which is moving potential readers away from your own content. But outlinks also perform a semantic function, which is to identify those sites which are hubs and those sites which are authorities.

Hubs are sites that link out to many other sites (imagine a directory), and authorities are sites that receive a lot of these inlinks. Both kinds of sites are useful for obvious reasons, and in calculating the value of each site, search algorithms use an iterative process whereby value is transferred back and forth from the hubs and authorities — the hubs giving value to the authorities, and the authorities (by virtue of their number of inlinks) transfering some of it back to the hubs.

Web design in the 1990s focused on bringing people to your site and keeping them there. Today’s sites focus on creating relevance by connecting themselves with authoritative sites. Given a new method of creating relevance and value, people would adopt different linking behaviors.

Below is a reference to a short and very readable article on this topic:
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Kleinberg, J. M. 1999. Hubs, Authorities, and Communities. ACM Computing Surveys 31. http://www.cs.brown.edu/memex/ACM_HypertextTestbed/papers/10.html

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