This was picked up from http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/ its kinda new and still on the homepage if someone wants the permalink. I think there is some politics going on. Look at the facts. 1)Link trading, devalues Adsense and Adwords. Google's Fuel. IMO, more people are resorting to link exchanges and other forms of link deals to drive traffic rather then these contextual ads. 2)Sites which exchange or purchase links see a much greater increase in traffic then those which wait around endlessly for links. (They could alternately purchase Adwords ) example. I got one, websecuritytip . com, a research paper i did in school a while back. I put it on the web, not 1 single link in over a year. 3)Exchanged or purchased links imo, don't muddle search engines results. They could also enhance them. For example a big blowout sale at Best Buy could end up as a google search result. Sly, Sly Goooooooooooooooogle
They didn't say that you should just wait around for links. Link-trading IS NOT the only way to get links to your site. The way to get quality links to your site is making good content and then promote it. Promoting it can mean going into relevant forums, asking related sites whether they want to link to you, submitting to directories or even (if you have the money) buying links.
To me it is obvious that Google needs to remove the links from their algo. PR is old fashioned and the whole thing about links only promotes some web sites. This is also the reason why they get so much spam in their index. Sites with tons of (spam)links gets good ranking immediately while other sites can sit forever and wait for a link. Begging for links is no fun and if you can only have "themed" links then you might have to hope for a competitor to give you a link. They need to move on and remove links as a variable in their algo and value content and other stuff instead.
They did not mention links that come through promotion at all. And they are pretty darn naive if they think people aren't going to promote their site. The way SEObook.com did it is precisely how I think a new site needs to go about doing it (if you are in a competitive space) and want to grow real quick (I can't find the link, unfortunately). Anyhow, the essence is: MARKET. Don't mind google - they are merely trying to keep their search results good. MARKETING does not work if you don't have something good to offer. MARKET means buying adwords, going into fora, having great content, going to conferences, research, make sure you become VERY GOOD. etc. If you do all that - links will follow. It's a bit like what Seth Rodin said about the Beatles (a link I could find): http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/03/when_did_the_be.html Just creating a site and hoping for links is like building a store and not telling anybody you made it. We should not let Google rule our lives. It's NOT god, it's just a company (a powerful one, granted). Anyhow its search results still rely on: - links to sites (though the place the links come from is getting more and more important) - content on site - uniqueness of the content (very unique sites can get indexed without links to them, as I recently found, but that's the exception). Google does not want us to try and influence SERPS, but that's really just them being unrealistic. That said: link-swapping is so easy to track for google that it is not a good way to get links to your site. Link buying on the other hand, if 'below the radar' should work fine.
The silly part is this. Say I make a great site with tons of unique content. I decide to market this through adwords. I start getting decent traffic and people are using my site. Now Adwords is designed for the user and not the webmasters. I dont go browsing through Adwords to find great sites to link to and I doubt many people do. So who is going to link to me? I really dont understand what they are trying to do besides make more money off of Adwords.
Well its sort of jargon which technical writers create, and its meaning can be interpreted in more then one way. In other words (ambiguity). Corporations do this, and in the event of a lawsuit, they can turn the meaning of what they wrote around to their advantage. They will never say specifically, or target or give examples because. 1)Then people can learn and find other ways to fool google search. 2)Google can turn around or represent what they wrote in different angles if they end up in court. But seems like google really wants to eradicate link selling and buying and leave the sites only at the mercy of purchasing adwords. I mean if u look at it from a different perspective. Also, could be a great time for another search engine or ranking standard to come in and take google's place. Cause they are creating a demand for it.
Well done... While I enjoyed that and agree with you for the most part, there are risks of buying text links.. just so everyone knows they aren't all as transparent as U may think SNIPPET; Just to add to what U said
There are many ways in which you could get good backlinks without buying them. I have a new blog with many back links and only a very few are reciprocal "none bought".
Recently I did a reciprocal link exchange between a cookery site and someone else's cookery site. The two were a perfect match and will be of use to visitors to both of the sites involved. Last week a large, well-known travel company contacted me to ask if they could pay for an advert (text link) on a travel site. To boost traffic or PR I have no idea and don't much care - the site was a good match for my own. Does the buyer call it advertising or link-buying? Again, who cares, it amounts to the same thing. Both of these links should be ignored? I don't think so. I think google just mean that clusters of links that are irrelevant, buried in footers, and are obviously not a vote of confidence for the site involved will be discounted, which is fair enough. If they do mean that ALL reciprocal and bought links should be ignored, and probably directory links as well, that isn't going to leave a whole lot of links to the vast majority of sites.
If u go to google's post on blogspot at the beginning of this thread, they specifically mention something bout reciprocal links. Google started this Pagerank standard, displayed it on their toolbar, but they are now discovering that other people are benefitting from it. Well of course, whenever u assign something a value and ranking, then it will be a source of competition. Compare with the score of a football game, annual income, driving record, credit report. Then u have this so called FILTERING of links which google says should be NATURAL, which is all good, but is ambigous. It's not going to stop link trading. It will just change how people do it. You will see less so called sitewide links. They will be scattered. New domains will popup. They will be announced privately. Be placed on different servers acrosss the globe. May be registered under aliases. And then if google still wants to get stricter, then it may end up filtering out the Natural links also by mistake. IMO, no matter how good of an algorithm u have, there is no substitute for human reasoning.
This has been all talked about before and Google has already changed it's algorithm to compensate natural and "honest" links. What happens is, reciprocal links have less weight than one way links from relevant sites. I'm going to look for the article and post the link here when I find it.
4 page thread on this here already from 2 days ago: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=211698
Sure, those links are on topic. That's far less of a problem. But if the cookery sites have only reciprocal links, that's going to be a problem. It's about the link-profile. Just like that matt cuts quote above. On topic & not recognizable as either bought or traded. That's really the point. Links should NOT be bought just for PR. That's what some people in this forum still need to learn. But on topic links, buy them if you have to.
if google did this then there results would be DESTROYED. It would turn into the quality of results that you get from tier 2 search engines. They just cant simply devalue link weight like that. It wont happen IMO.
If that is the case its not good news for people like TextLinkAds and other similar sites that act as a middleman for buying and selling link. Personally, I think buying and selling links will never be totally devalued.
I agree. Any SEO algorithm is going to be spammed some. There are after all huge stakes involved in ranking well. What they need to do is keep watching the market and figure out ways that work to get us the best search results. And of course they are going to tell us the ways they want us to behave to make their lives easier. But that's just not going to happen. As long as there are ways to manipulate results (and there are bound to be), people will try them. By the way: a good site can advertise in adwords and get regular links from them because people land on that site, like it and link to it. It's about getting exposure. It's not within my budget, nor do I have that type of ambition - but that's how and why it works.
As long as links sold are usually not found out, they aren't in trouble. It's the 'under the radar' thing.