Google and Links. No, no, no, no, no, no. That's NOT how to do it!

You want to rise up the rankings so you need to get lots of links, right? No, wrong!

Looking around here in DP I see so many people chasing rubbish that I felt I just had to make this post.

Link exchanges: Why do you guys even bother? Link exchanges with sites that are not related to yours in content likely don't do anything for you. Many of these links are from pages called links.htm or resources.htm which is pretty worthless. Most such links pages were greybarred in PR and importance by Google years ago! And if you don't keep on top of monitoring your IBLs you'll end up with others pulling their links to you in a few months. Even pages that look kosher are likely worthless particularly if they host a wide range of unrelated-topic links.

Also, you are deceiving yourself if you think that Google can't detect link exchanges. It's piss easy. Three way linking? C'mon, you really think an SE that can search 780 million pages and come up with the right results in 0.27 seconds can't recognise three way linking patterns?!

Page Rank: It's not about PR anymore! Why do so many people here keep chasing Page Rank. It's plainly evident in the SERPs that PR is not the sole determinate of ranking. A Google search for "data backup" gives me these PR results in order: 6,4,4,7,7,6,3,6,6,4. For "Make Money Online" it's 2, 2,5,4,3,4,3,5,3,4,0,5. For Viagra it's 5,5,5,6,3,0,6,5,4,2,4. They are all competitive terms and notice how PR0 pages make it to the top 10 and how PR2 and 3 often trump PR6?

So why then do so many people here keep chasing PR? It's a mug's game. The seller of the PR link could have faked the PR, could have appropriated someone else's PR (using a dropped domain), and is likely the type who'll pimp PR till his site gets completely banned. All of them are worthless or soon to be worthless links. Even if it's all genuine PR it's likely to be worth less to you than a link from a PR0 page that's already on the first page of SERPs.

Even reporters who should know nothing about SEO think so. See CNN article. Unfortunately even they don't know the difference between toolbarPR and algo PR ("PageRank is the currency of the Web." Bullsh*t. That's what it used to be - around the time Jesus was doing his water to wine trick).

Sitewides: Google did a big hit against sidewides some time ago but nobody seems to be aware of it - they still go chasing sitewide links and selling sitewides. There are some discussions about using iframes to skirt the sitewide problems but, at the end of the day, it's usually seen as an unnatural linking pattern. Selling sitewide footer links probably does your site immense damage. And why would anyone want to buy links from a crap site that has casino, dating, mesothelioma and loan consolidation link all in one footer?

Directories: That ship sailed a long time ago. Most directories now are maintained by SEO types just to sell links. If you find a quality, niche directory that is discriminating in who it links to, then you might be on to a good thing. But, less than 1% of the directories out there are such quality directories. Most are junk.

Double joke: The trick of buying a high PR dropped domain and turning it into a directory. People are still chasing these links. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

You need to be very, very fussy when buying links. Buy only from quality sites if you don't want to waste money (see my thread and what I insist on when buying links). And when you're selling links... link out to crap sites and you do your own site irreparable damage. Link out to quality sites and you'll actually go up the rankings (as I've described here)!

What type of links are YOU buying?

 

Agree with 3 way link exchange can be caught by Google.
But If you get at backlink from non related Good PR page then its good

Also, there are more then 200 methods through which Google decides Search Engine position so we should not only concentrate on PR

 

Excellent post Foggy.

Makes me laugh when you see people stumping up $80 for comments on PR6 .edu and .gov blogs. Little do they realise that because there is no relevancy whatsoever and there are 2000 other spam comments on there they get the grand sum of 'no benefit whatsoever' for their 80 bucks.

 

do you have any reliable source to back these points?? I think it will be of benefit to the reader.
otherwise its just talk

 

Hey, digiblogger17, please ignore this thread. Yes, it's all talk. Go back to buying your sitewides and blog comment spam

(Geez, give people some useful tips and instead of going and doing independent research they want you to hold their hand and lead them to the money!)

Good point. That's another joke around here. Someone gets access to a page on a uni site that the IT dept hasn't noticed yet and they spam it up to the brim before it gets deleted. Good thing for them there's a steady supply of bozos around here willing to pay money for this.

 

Foggy, thanks for your post. Is there an AUTHORITATIVE guide to SEO? I'm just a newbie trying to ramp up.

thanks!

 

Good points about the reciprocal links and the blog comments. Of course the directories might not be that horrific as you have mentioned but they need to be simply part of the link building and focusing over them too much is truly a mistake.

 

I'm buying cheap one way crap links and it seems to work fine.

 

All the points describe here are true and i agree with "Foggy"
Pagerank is now not the matter of SERP, its just matter of link sales, increase u r PR and sale links.
About directories, u must have seen the video by Matt Cutts (Google Eng.) He is clearly saying that directories are of no use, they are just link farms. and avoid directories which guaranties inclusion of link for some $$.
and yes Link exchange.. its really a poor people's seo (but now it is NOT)
Google or even normal bots can easily detect the link exchange schemes, so avoid them

 

Good post dude, you know what you are talking about. Recips links for SEO was very 2005. Sitwide links are okay to do, just not on a large scale.

btw, why are you quoting reporters who probably know nothing about SEO to prove a point. It doesn't make much sense, lol.

 

Many news companies hire SEO pros to write articles on SEO. !!
Just like what CNET do.

 

good post! totally agreed! rep added

 

Very good post! Yet people still try and argue back with little or no proof ... sigh!

 

Can't agree more with you.
Guys let's focus on our websites SERP's and forget about PR.. even thought it's was and still one of the most important factors to rank websites in Google SE that's only if done right be targeting the required list of Anchor Text

 

Hey, Sorry not to mention that it was a good Post, actually you have good points and I agree with you on many.

However when you say about Sitewide links

the reader will get the idea that sitewide links are worthless or can get you banned, you didn't mention what type of sitewide links and how big is too big

the same thing with directories you use generalization here, yes submitting your site to a free directory where your link will be on a page that might not even have enough PR to get indexed is worthless. but you can't deny that having a link on a quality sponsered directory or on the home page like Bid directories can help a lot in increasing your PR

I think this forum is for discussing information before accepting them as facts
I am very careful about SEO related info, especially on DP forum, I think you agree with me.

 

I don't know. Nobody does. When in doubt, avoid them. I link to my homepage on every single page of my site. Bad? Of course not. I buy a sitewide footer link on a video game site with anchor text "cheap mortgages". Will I get penalised for that? Unlikely. But will it help? Probably not - it's off-site and off-topic.

What about the link seller? He's being stupid because that's a well known red flag..

Google says (FWIW) that sold links should be marked as ads. And they are keen to weed out sold links that are passing as natural links. Sitewides scream that money exchanged hands. Webmasters have been trying to manipulate SERP since SEs first appeared. And Google is sick of it. They would like to know every sold link and remove the rep it bestows. So our best moves as webmasters is to go for those links that Google just can't detect as ads. The safest long term strategy is to buy those links with those anchors that even the human eye can't detect as being sold links - like relevant, in-content links to quality destinations.

Have a look at this UK article on making money online. It's #1 in Google UK for Make Money Online. It's a five page article with hundreds of outgoing links. Study the links, see the relevance of every single one? Each adds to the article, supports it, extends the discussion. Google likes that! If it was about PR ... this article leaks PR so badly it shouldn't be anywhere in the top 1000 for that search term.

Pretty much all external-site sitewides are worthless, IMO. And the off-topic ones even more so. Off-topics links sitting next to all manner of unrelated other off-topic ad links looks like (and can algorithmically be assessed as close to) junk.

I appreciate that sellers of sitewides may defend sitewide links here. And PR pimps won't agree that PR doesn't matter.

I didn't know about Bid Directory but I just had a look. My verdict: SPAM. Any directory that is non-selective in who it lists is destined to forever be nothing but a glorified link farm.

Good. Then do your research before you buy into the ridiculous links that are regularly traded here in DP.

 

i have a doubt foggy ..is it ok to buy in-content links from websites that are not related but from related blogposts/articles on non-related websites [ i mean buying blogposts?]?What do you say?I understand that it would have less importance than from a related site.But is it ok or has any disadvantages?Need your advice on this topic.Thanks for your impressive advice

 

You discount PR yet 70% of the sites you listed are PR4 and above. And there are quite a few 6's in there too.
Sorry mate, you didn't encourage me to be happy with my PR2

 

Sounds like great advice, but how can you back this up? lets see some of your sites...

By the way, I followed some of the NO NO NO NO's and my sites turned out just fine. I look for SITEWIDE links because I don't care about more backlinks but rather the traffic that they can send me (most of the time sitewide links appear in premium *high traffic* locations).

Not to mention, most bigger sites won't even look at you as a partner/ affiliate or even bother with mentioning your name if you don't have PR. Sure its useless when it comes to generating income but it is a gold mine when you're communicating with other related sites (especially those much larger than you)

 

The beauty of SEO is thats for most part its just speculation!