A few months ago Patrick Altoft came up with some evidence that linking to digitalpoint.com could harm you with Google: http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/linking-to-digital-point-does-harm-rankings/ I thought he was wrong at 1st, but I have just found some more evidence that further proves that his theory is correct. Check it out on my blog here: http://www.seoco.co.uk/blog/2008/08/02/more-proof-that-google-loves-digitalpointcom/ What do you think?
Did not understand your article, by the way i left a comment Can You double check this. Digital Point Geotargeting Tool - PR0 its PR6.
http://birdflueconomics.blogspot.com/ PageRank 4 with the link to the same page as yours , if you take the time to check the backlinks from any DP tools you will see this is the case, don't forget to include this data on your blog so you can debunk the myth , thanks
2 Links is not enough to prove it, I would say. DP is not a link farm, so I don't see any reason Google would drop rank for the links pointing to DP. Just my thoughts.
I think Digital Point has established themselves as an authoritative website so can't see any reason why Google will penalize any links to the website.
yeah, it has a lot of authority on how to try and manipulate search rankings, so maybe google is mad??
dp is full of users who use black hat techniques and teach others, the main reason for dp is to generate money. users of dp create websites for the search engines not the user, their are many more reasons. its the anti google forum.
I think dp might have helped my website in increasing pr. But i have noticed somthing weird. Before when you searched my website's name, it used to appear first. But now my website's links from dp are on the top and my website's rank dropped.
"DP is the anti-Google forum." That's a hard pill to swallow. I'm afraid I disagree. Just because it is very large and popular, definitely means that it will attract all types of people. Just like you will find all types of people at the beach, some really gruesome. But that doesn't mean that the beach is anti-good people. My highest ranking single page, a PR6, links directly to DP.
@ Mr Vaughn: Digital Point being large and popular does not come into it. I believe that there is a lot more manual intervention with the Google rankings then most people think. I believe that certain sites/pages get manually white flagged and I also believe that sites/pages like yours could have been white flagged a long time ago. This might easily explain why your page has not been affected. I am not trying stop people from linking to DigitalPoint.com - I love DP. I think Google penalising websites for linking out whilst not getting paid is crummy - period. BTW: Your analogy sucks ass, what has being gruesome got to do with being good? Also your page is down to PR5 and IMO it gets well too much credit for whatever reason.
excellent post and food for thought (green rep added too) how much white and black flagging could google been doing that is messing up some people's lives and helping other people that they like for whatever reason, it is a shame that they just can't come up with an algorithm and stick with it
Thanks for the info, I just checked. It looks like they knocked me down 1 PR for every page. Gee, thanks again. Maybe it is because of that "undeserved" white flag that you mentioned. OK. Let me try again. 1. Mankind follows a normal distribution. 2. Some people are good, some people are bad. 3. The more people in any group, the higher the chance of there being more bad people. 4. DP is very large - therefore, there are some idiots here. 5. That does not make the "whole" of DP bad, or negative. 6. Attempting to extrapolate from the specific to the general can result in false conclusions. Picking out a few (TWO) examples, and saying that is the norm, may not be the best logic. Is that better? . .
Sorry man, you had a crack at ugly people as far as I am concerned (i am not a looker) - that got me rattled. To be 100% honest I am a little jealous of your page as well.
Wow, sorry. I sure didn't mean unattractive people. I live in Santa Cruz, and every time I go down to the wharf, well, let's just say that there are many derelicts down there. Not just unkempt druggies, but some mean and nasty intoxicated individuals. It seems like they wander west, hit the water, and can't go any farther. Not so good for the tourists, either. FYI, just between you and I, that is my high school graduation photo (1962). I am now a white-haired, morbidly obese old man. Maybe I should use a real photo. As far as jealous, I do 14 hours of Google, AdSense and the like every day, 7 days a week. Nothing else to do. And my EPC is in freefall. Nothing to be jealous of here.
I guess gruesome can mean a lot of different things and thinking about it I am the shallow one thinking that is what you meant. I like your page really and think it is a great piece of research which deserves its rank. I attacked your page because I thought you were a shallow person - I have had a few beers as well which probably didn't help my judgment. Many smack heads and crack heads are indeed pretty gruesome - you probably have different drugs and different words in the US. I do however still believe that Google could be slapping penalties on sites that link to the point. I don’t think trusted/white flagged sites/pages (like yours) are affected.
Thank you. I just had my second beer, myself. Smackheads and crackheads for sure, but speed-meth-ice-crank-gofast is the biggest problem here. Sooo destructive. You know, I wonder about that "white-flag"/ track-record/ time-proven/ quality/ trust factor in the algo, and I wonder just how many of these types of factors there might be. Each one is valuable in its own right, but taken together, they would make a convincing summation. I guess that is what PR is, plus other stuff like links, traffic and size. Anybody else with any anecdotes regarding the "linking to DP" issue? You're getting me scared here. After all, I just lost -1PR for . . . what reason? I have been improving and adding content, traffic has been increasing, Alexa 56K. I have been dinged for something. I do link to them from several pages. On the other hand, I have been reading about the "mega-menu" problem today, which could certainly be my problem. Another post.