Updated Google Patent Hints At Linkage Penalties and Site Expiry by rustybrick at SE RoundTable September 19, 2008
Thanks for the info. This explains some of the things people on this forum have been noticing about things like redesigned content dropping in rankings. I'm interested to see how they determine which sites could legitimately get a lot of links in a short period of time. It seems like they are saying if your site has dynamic offerings, then you could technically get away with getting a lot of links at once. I just hate trying to decipher what exactly they mean in their legal patent talk. This patent is better than the last one for readability, but still requires an extra read through or two.
Thanks for the info minstrel, Interesting stuff there. I am the same, I hate trying to decipher or assume anything that is writen as "may be used" or "could be used". But I guess the nature of Google's success is it's ability to keep the important factors a secret, and to keep everybody else guessing. Interesting none the less. Cheers James
this is a bit disturbing on many levels, and it might explain some of the crap we have seen from google in recent months so if you buy a domain that has been parked for a few months, and it fits your site idea perfectly, and you pay good money for the domain, and you put up your site that is in the same topic and niche of the original site that had the backlinks, google might say "the backlinks from before are now worth zero" that is ridiculous if links are out there, they should be treated equally, regardless of who owned the domain, if the links are irrelevant topic-wise, then score them a little less, but don't disregard somewhat relevant links just because a site was parked for awhile..... I have had sites on a server that got hacked and it took us almost a month to fix all the problems and get the sites back up and running, and google decided to zero the PR on a bunch of them, how fair is that????? and se traffic from google has plummeted! chalk one up for a victory to the hackers, thanks to google
Well the information here is certainly helpful because it clears out a lot of doubts and confusion that we had earlier. Google has been very secretive about their algorithm and I think the interpretation from this article actually more or less comes close to the actual one.
"The dates that links appear can also be used to detect "spam," where owners of documents or their colleagues create links to their own document for the purpose of boosting the score assigned by a search engine. A typical, "legitimate" document attracts back links slowly. A large spike in the quantity of back links may signal a topical phenomenon (e.g., the CDC web site may develop many links quickly after an outbreak, such as SARS), or signal attempts to spam a search engine (to obtain a higher ranking and, thus, better placement in search results) by exchanging links, purchasing links, or gaining links from documents without editorial discretion on making links." I am little confused. Is Google going to penalize a site that gets lot of backlinks quickly? The word Spam is used in the above paragraph? If so, then what will happen if a person build thousands of backlinks for its competitor everyday so that he gets penalized ?
this is one of the biggest misconceptions in SEO. "penalized" in this instance (unless banned) means only ignoring the new links would you risk building thousands of backlinks for a competitor? what if they only ignored 5/6ths of them and the rest powered your competitor straight past you?
I think many would risk it, at least experiment on some other sites to see effects before doing it on the specific site that you want to pass I bet there are 1000's of such experiments going on all over the web right now and probably 1000's of innocent sites being experimented on by black hatters without even the knowledge of the site owners
Thanks for the good read! What surprised me the most whilst reading it is that they seem to look negatively upon link exchanges, I didn't know they were against that. I personally don't like link exchanges but the general consensus seems to be that link exchanges are good and are welcomed by google. I guess they're wrong.
Thanks for sharing it. This answers few of my questions about dropped search ranking for some major keywords on one of my site.
I agree with this point 100%. "Getting links too fast" has always been a myth - if Google wants to allow competitors to knock each other out of SERPs with childish linking strategies, then Google has probably jumped the shark.