What is the most popular “here”-linked website in the whole Internet?

The here-link-curse

There is a bad habit that’s, unluckily, still quite common, and that is a specific (wrong) way of people using hyperlinks. I’m sure you all have stumbled upon a website using links in this way (and many of you are doing it without ever wondering why it’s wrong). It’s the glorious links of “here”. There are countless uses for the word “here” in hyperlinks, for example:

• Here is the relevant story
• You can download the paper here
• Here is the observation paper and here is the results paper

And the list goes on and on. What’s wrong in all these “here” links is that the authors are linking the wrong words. A hyperlink is supposed to link something (e.g. a word, a sentence, a picture) to something else (usually a web page). So, for example, instead of forming a link as in

You can download the program here

it should be formed as

Download the program

so that the semantics of the link are properly used.

The Google effect

Now, this article is not a lesson on how to use hyperlinks, or a petition to let the whole world know that the here-link-curse should stop. If the mentioned example enlightened you into forming your hyperlinks more effectively, that’s fine, our world counts one less here-link web author. The driving force for writting this article was the question that formed in my head while reading an article with a here-link: where does “here” link to, for Google?

Google, as you may know, is using an algorithm called PageRank to index the World Wide Web. PageRank uses hyperlinks in all indexed pages around the Internet and after some delicate mathematical computations, comes up with the relevance of a word, or phrase, to a website. The more a specific word, or phrase, is linked to a specific website, the higher it gets in the results when queried with this phrase.

For example, if there were thousands of web pages linking the phrase “blueberry tree” to my weblog, then if you googled the term “blueberry tree” you’d most probably get my weblog first in the search results. That’s a core part of Search Engine Optimization, and is also used in Google Bombing.

The “here” winner

So, back to our question: what are the most here-linked, or “pointed to” websites in the Internet? To come up with the answer, one should just google the word “here”. Are you curious (like I was) to see who comes first in the search result? Here (heh) it is:

Adobe - Adobe Reader Download - All versions

Yes, Adobe Acrobat Reader download page is the #1 result for googling the word “here”! This means that the most common here-link is something like “Download Acrobat Reader here“. Second to the list comes MapQuest.Com: Maps, Directions and More and third is Apple’s Quicktime page (where here-linking authors are pointing their users to download Quicktime).

The list goes on and includes Rhapsody & RealPlayer, IE 7, a Universal Currency Converter, Java etc.

The same “effect” can be seen with other search engines as well, even though they do not yield the same results. Yahoo, for example, displays Adobe Reader download at rank 11, while displaying at it’s #1 rank some website www.heretv.com.