Leader links
For each of thirty topics we take the sites ranking in the top thirty for the topic’s most competitive US-English keywords (the leaders, the only domains we name publicly) and count how many of them each publisher in the catalogue links to. A publisher that links to a topic’s leaders writes about the topic; one that links to none of them has a category label and nothing behind it.
Where does leader links appear in the API?
leader_links: { topic: { linked, of } } on root-domain rows; prefer_leaders in a brief ranks by it; the why says “links to 5 of the top 50 finance sites”. Feeds the relevance reading and the graph component of the score.
Why does it matter?
It is the strongest relevance and quality signal in one number, and it comes from the web graph rather than from anything a seller wrote. Method: the web graph.
See it on a live row:
“Explain leader links on the rows of a 3-link finance plan.”
Methods: research methodology.