Comments on: Google To Devalue Links?

By: Bill Simcox

Bill Simcox — Thu, 07 May 2009 19:09:10 +0000

Frightened me to death.

I’m working like crazy to get inbound links, but thankfully, they are still OK.

Thanks for the post

Bill

By: David LaFerney

David LaFerney — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 15:25:40 +0000

I guess Google’s openness (aka “have other sites link to yours” and you’ll be on top) that brought us to the anti-paid links war was actually meant to help ‘regular’ smaller webmasters…

I’m sure it was, just as the toolbar widget was, but I doubt if they envisioned the effect that it would have on SEO practices.

Actually, I imagine that the intent of almost every helpful action that Google takes is to help us help Google.

But that’s just business.

By: Ann Smarty

Ann Smarty — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 13:55:23 +0000

@David LaFerney: leaving webmasters wondering about their rankings would be a solution definitely. I always said that SEs shouldn’t be too open about their algorithms. The only alerting thing is that with it, smaller webmasters would be suffering more as we, SEOs, (and thus larger companies that can afford us) will figure out the algorithm any way – we have the opportunity to experiment, test and compare, moreover we have knowledge. I guess Google’s openness (aka “have other sites link to yours” and you’ll be on top) that brought us to the anti-paid links war was actually meant to help ‘regular’ smaller webmasters…

By: David LaFerney

David LaFerney — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 03:51:32 +0000

It’s hard to imagine that any such changes would happen quickly. Until a method is developed to measure actual relevance pagerank is surely going to remain a major factor.

As you pointed out stealthy paid links are probably almost impossible to detect, so in the long run G may be exacerbating the problem by smacking down the TBPR of sites which blatantly sell links.

An effective option might have been to adjust the actual PR and leave the tool bar rank alone, and leave all of the effected parties wondering why they were dropping down the SERPs.

Instead, it seems likely that the link trade will be driven underground where it will be very hard to detect.

By: Ann Smarty

Ann Smarty — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 12:14:10 +0000

Matt Sawyer posted a great comment concerning this at davidnaylor.co.uk:

http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/buying-links-what-if.html

By: Ann Smarty

Ann Smarty — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 15:08:23 +0000

Thank you, Liam, for your detailed response. And I fully agree with you. Google has a plenty of powerful and popular tools to look into when evaluating the website. But I think to totally switch to a completely new algorithm, it will take much more time. Besides, all these factors can also be contradictory.

By: Liam Delahunty

Liam Delahunty — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 14:12:58 +0000

Whilst I agree that fundamentally Google has built its search engine’s SERPs relevancy on calculating pagerank (not the toobar version) from linkage it has many other tools at its disposal to measure a site’s “attention” aside from inbound links.

If Google only looked at their own tools there are still many other factors that they can consider in their calculations too. The number of unique users with bookmarks in the Google toolbar, the “note this” functionality, click-throughs and mentions of a site’s URLs in (non spam) gmail and other traffic through their servers. If a cookie is stored via analytics they will also know the site’s repeat visitor numbers and many other factors. They can monitor CTR on advertising and SERPs positions and indeed monitor “exit” traffic to AdSense and deduce if a site is specifically MFA.

Looking outside themselves to social media “hits”, rankings on other search engines, link patterns, footprints, “quality” traffic via services such as hitwise.

Al of these factors could be considered fairly easily in determining a site’s ranking, and whilst the links remain the highest priority for offsite SEO, I feel these other factors will become more important over time as Google try to combat what they see as a problem with paid linking.