Google has always made it hard..... Short cuts in life lead to making the news as the Chinese seem to be doing making products that harm and kill... See the recent recall of toys with lead paint?? Short cuts in business are great as long as you don't get caught. Like any business, Google has a right to defend itself against those who are lazy and take short cuts.
I agree, and if we all focused on great products, services, and content, then we would not need shortcuts. And if the Webmaster is actually putting up the site FOR it's customers, then PR is truly secondary, as outside of internet forums, very few people actually know what it is or where to look for it. My mom gets PR on her google bar and once told me she thought it it was like her system monitor. She thought that the lower the bar the faster the site went so she kept her eye out for pages with 0. My wife will not speculate as to it's meaning but she says she has no clue what it's for. My best friend who is a web designer refuses to use it because it just confuses his clients (most of his clients have a PR4-7 from what I've seen). Most of my other friends are clueless about it's meaning. Most of the members on my forum are clueless about it. So if we focused on People rather then Page Rank just imagine how much better the web would/could be.
Right on the money! It's People we need to deliver the message to... not users or visitors. Alot of what you noted are the same things I tell people about Alexa toolbar lol. From the SEO perspective over 95% of my clients want front page results, traffic, and links.....none worry of PR. Why would I worry about it then if my clients don't??
This is the point. Free serps are Free Lunch. If you are going to bogart to much "free lunch" by using excessive reciprocal links and paid links, Google will slap your hands. Google is the king of Spam and the big money spammers are Google flunkies. Google is partnered with Unasi Inc with an address in the Banana Republic of Panama. Unasi Inc has lost numerous WIPO Arbitration cases. I had a run in with these guys a couple of years ago. I wake up and find Unasi Inc has squatted on the .net and .org versions of one of my domains and placed Google AdSense for domains on the domains. Google AdSense for domains allows cybersquatters to partner with Google to generate revenues for both parties. I sent Google a trademark complaint and got back a b.s. response from a Google staff attorney. I responded back with a cease and desist letter. Within a hour the domains were unregistered. These big domain guys can hold onto a domain for 48 hours and give it back without paying. Now I think that my problem is solved Hehehe. Yeah right. I week later I receive a letter from the Google staff attorney with some more b.s. and Unasi Inc has the domains back up with Google AdSense for domains. What the F*! I sent the staff attorney a letter advising him that we can settle the matter in Federal Court and the domains came down again. This time I spent the $20 top register them. Google has 12,000 evaluators in India. I figure that they concentrate on checking the results of the money keywords. I was out there like SuvivorMan. In the first month I made $5000 USD So that got me sucked in. I started buying more land and then the rules changed. The "coffee crisis" started. The price paid for coffee went from $130 a sack to $30. The same story is true for is for any webmaster. You make some money and start to build more sites. At any time your revenue can dry up. Things are subject to change at any time. Always have a back-up plan. Relevant Reciprocals still work in Google. If they didn't work then Google wouldn't be so concerned about them. There's a whole link industry out there employing who knows hom many thousands of people that do nothing but send out link exchange requests. Agreed. The web existed before Google. Google has the majority percentage of search traffic. But the thing most site owners forget is that someone can find you by clicking on a link. Even if that link is a reciprocal. I've just made $15,000 off a couple of clicks on reciprocal links. Anything that can bring a buyer to you is good in my opinion. The buyers don't come to look at the green bar.
Does anybody actually read anything anymore? No where has google said that reciprocal linking gets you banned, or even causes a drop in rankings. What they do say is that having a disregard to quality and relevance when exchanging links could negatively affect your rankings Google is stepping up it's quality filter with respect to links, it's time for webmasters to do the same. I started SEO in september 2004 as a reciprocal links manager for 500 sites - and i was told back then that only relevant links were allowed. Relevancy has been key to link building for years, why are people so surprised to hear google say it now?
Probably do but the point is if done right anyone can manipulate the system and get away with I don't care if Larry Sergei and Schmidt sat down and tried to catch it. It's done by one of the largest players in all media and done very effectively. It's all about CYA Hide and seek and ye shall find success....
Excessive reciprocal linking can get you banned even if the links are relevant. No where does Google quality guidelines state that if the excessive reciprocals are relevant, its o.k. Mr. "Reciprocal Links Manager" please note that its all about "Excessive".
Haha !!!! Tell em!! It's called tripping filters..... Algorithms work by detecting spikes and aberrations Excesses like the man said.... Think of reciprocal or any unnatural links as drugs... too many and your site ODs
Well my comment was made as a positive step taken by Google to curb some sites and page rank was just an example.
I kind of think of it like crack. And the hooked webmasters as crack heads. I'm not trying to put anyone down. Back in 2005 a link was a link. That's what seo was about. You threw up a bunch of reciprocal links and you were page one. That's what I did. I thank Google for the $250,000 that they put in my pocket over the last 18 months. It was good, but, the reciprocal free lunch is over.