No Owlcroft, I was not kidding you. I have a lot of books on HTML and all the rest, but this is a specific type of page build out. Like I said, if you could publish a technical paper (concept) it would be worth money to a lot of webmasters.
I love your answer..................... I couldn't tell myself, and I have a bad habit of being sarcastic a lot.
I do respect your opinion Ferett... I think that you are right... A LOT of SEO firms spout crap. I do however object to you assuming that I don't realise that fact. The point I have been trying to get to is that reciprocal linking for the sake of it (linking to everything and anything to get higher in the SERP's) is no longer of benefit to the site... Related links work...
Prove it! What is your foundation for making such a categorical statement as that? Not all reciprocal links are (linking to everything and anything to get higher in the SERP's), but you are condemining all reciprocal links as far as I can see. If you want to talk about a particular style of linking, or a linking philosophy, them by all means do so, but if you really apply this condemantion to reciprocal links per se, then you don't know what you are talking about.
Compar.. Please don't have a go at me... The last post I made was badly written and as a result gave the wrong impression... When I said I was emplying that links to unrelated sites do not help.. Sorry again to bother you Compar... Feel free to *strike me down* if you disagree with my last comment too.
Well Compar, I have asked you in this thread, "Why have "so called SEO experts" come out with articles (many threads on many forums also) stating the Recip. Links are dead? You have seen these articles, if SE has no basis for what he says, why have these things been published. I am not trying to rough anyone up here, just be fair and debate folks.
There is nothing to debate without evidence. Early on in this thread I gave a link to what I consider to be one of the most knowledgeable people in the business "Dirk Johnson". That was my debating point. But nobody has countered any of the claims in this article. Nobody has even acknowlegded reading it. So I take it they just want to continue with all the unsubstantiated claims despite all the arguements I've advanced -- Stanford & UCLA etc. -- and documentation I have offered. At the end of 60 posts on the subject SEbasic makes the same assertions as he did in the begining of the thread. Then he justifies the email by saying it was badly written. That just insults me even more. Not only did he not acknowledge or respond to any of my aguements or evidence, he then didn't even have enough respect to take the time to write a carefully worded reply. If his mind is so completely made up why did he ask the question in the first place? One can only assume that all the statements about not being sure, where just window dressing. After 60 posts it looks to me like he is totally sure.
Compar... I apologise... The basis for my belief is this (obviously not this article alone) http://www.seorank.com/analysis-of-hilltop-algorithm.htm If the Hilltop Algo is in fact in place, that means that Google aquisition of Applied semantics is now in full swing... If this is the case, then related links are the only ones that *should* be of any help... This explains why... http://javelina.cet.middlebury.edu/lsa/out/cover_page.htm Basically, Sites are judged in terms of relevance to each other... I have not based my opinion (which as I HAVE said, may well be wrong) solely on these artices... At PubCon I spoke to several guys who DID have ACTUAL evidence (If only I did also) that related links are now begining to be the only ones of any real benefit... Compar, I did not mean to offend you... Sorry S <edit> Almost forgot this... http://www.scientificamerican.com/a...D2-1C70-84A9809EC588EF21&pageNumber=1&catID=2 </edit>
OK Compar, This is quoted from my view of your page. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- As expected, any talk of reciprocal linking brings forward a barrage of over-heated discussion. Since I started this thread, please allow me a chance to respond to much of what has been said, both here and elsewhere on the web. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- It seems that is exactly what happened, "a barrage of overheated discussion", so Dirk is right about that statement. But getting back to the point I made, why did "so called SEO experts" come out and publish "RECIP. LINKS ARE DEAD" subject matter recently. I will post the links on this if pressed.
There is no date on this article although it is copyrighted 2003. It is typical of the speculation and discussion that went around late last year after Google's Forida update. However, no real evidence ever presented itself to prove that Google was in fact using Hilltop , Local Rank, Applied Semantics, or Topical Sensitive Page Rank and I don't think you will find any article written with in the last 3 or 4 months that would suggest so. So the first thing you need to do is make sure you are reading current thought on the subject. Don't try and prove your point with 7 or 8 month old information. And who says reciprocal links can't be or are not topical? I talked in detail about the reciprocal links on my pharmacy site and how topical there are. Did you read that? What did it mean to you? I scanned this article. I don't see where it says Google is doing these things. Nobody knows what Google is doing. What he has done is written a technical paper suggesting what Google and other SEs should do, or might do, to assure relevance. Anecdotal evidence at best. I've offered you anecdotal eveidence of it working. Why isn't my acedotal as good as their anecdotal? Hell we have people on this forum saying "I got out of the left side of the bed this morning and Google penalized me by dropping my ranking 10 places." If you meet them at PubCon does that constitute truth? Don't worry about offending me. I just respond strongly and passionately. If I didn't feel passionate about this I wouldn't do it. But I rarely carry a grudge, and we may well end up in total agreement on the next thread.
when a site shows up higher, yet has a lower page rank than a site that shows up lower, that says to me that the site that shows up higher has better on page optimization than the site below it. REmember folks, it is a combo of PR and on-page optimization... All this talk of page rank and we easily forget that google does put some importantace in on page elements......... This may have been said before in thie thread, but I am tired of reading the rants from the dude up north.....
Dude in NJ, don't be so easy on Compar, I have called him worse things than "The Dude up North". Compar is cool as hell and you can learn a lot from his ranting and raves, so just let him be. He may decide to sock you soon if you are not careful. "The Dude up North" ain't no dummy, so with all due respect, BE COOL!
You are wrong. If you read my first message in this thread you will see that I said I agree with SEbasic 100% that PR has almost no significant value in regards to SERP placement. It is not the PR of a page or a link that determines SERP placement, it is the relevance of the inbound link judged mainly from its anchor text. The on-page content also has little direct influence on the SERP placement for popular or competitive search terms. Two of the outstanding examples of this are the Apple and Dell pages. Both rank very high in the SERPs for the search term "computer", yet neither of them have this word anywhere on their home pages. The other example is the famous Google bomb " miserable failure". If you search on this phrase you will find George Bush's official White House biography at #1 place in the SERP. These examples clearly show that it is anchor text that gets you ranked in the SERPs. They also show in the case of "miserable failure" that the link does not have to be from a semantically related page. So my freind you may be tired of my rant -- and by the way you can call me Bob or Compar -- but I would suggest that you should pay attention. You might learn something.
(Presumably, that "relevance" is relevance to the phrase or topic being searched for to produce the SERPs in question.) What I reckon confuses many is that very often PR will track with SERPs, since they flow from what is, at bottom, the same thing: strong backlinks. The PR, as best I understand it, derives no special benefit from anchor text, as it is independent of topic, whereas SERPs are inherently topic-focussed and so depend strongly on the relevance of the backlinks. But if most of one's backlinks are reasonably relevant to the topic of a page, then one would expect the PR and the SERPs for that page's topical keywords to track closely. The more interesting cases, as I see it, are the ones where PR and SERPs do not track well. High PR but low SERPs would imply, as best I can see, many strong backlinks few of which are closely relevant to the search topic. If we search for <salsify scorzonera>, we are not surprised if few or no high-PR pages show up, because few or no high-PR pages, no matter how many strong or super-strong backlinks they have, will have many (or any) backlinks with salsify or scorzonera in their text. Low PR but high SERPs would, it seems to me, usually be cases of a search topic with few pages at all (relatively) in the running--for example, a page with just one or two backlinks containing salsify or scorzonera in their text would probably get excellent SERPs on those terms.
SE, I am trying to be fair with you and with Compar, but it seems that your last post is not worthy of this great thread that you started. Why the thread highjacking comment? Bob has contributed valuable information and so have you, do you feel that kind of comment is justified when he has given so much to the thread you started? Please just debate the issues, we will still be friends at the end of the day, no hard feelings are really needed, we are all trying to learn and contribute.
Has anyone considered the correlation between not only the frequency of page indexes per PR, but also the #depth# of page indexes per PR ? Some quote G and state that a max 100 links can appear on a page, while others claim far greater numbers of links will be indexed on a page (both pages same bytesize) - citing PR as the governing factor. I'm curious just how well anchor text at the end of the page will fare if it's on a PR 4 page with 700 links
Owlcroft, You talk in you last post about "strong" backlinks. I believe your definition of "strong" is backlinks from page with a high PR. I would quibble just a little bit with this definition. I would continue to answer that a backlink becomes "strong" relevant to the SERP placement for a given search term or keyword, when its anchor text contains part or all of the search term. Backlink have two distinct attributes. The one obviously is PR. As you know I've recently written an article called PageRank and how to get it that explains PR in significant detail. (As an aside the article is going to be published in the SitePro News newsletter on Monday.) The other value, and unfortunately the value that has no published unit of measurement, is the relevance of the anchor text used for the backlink, to the search term, that the SERP is being compiled in response to. Since it is really the anchor text that determines SERP placement I would prefer to see the term "strong" used relevant to this value rather than towards PR. High PR isn't "strong" in my view it is just a high number.
I picked this up from a Blogsite, I thought it would be of great interest to you all. Have fun. Does The Number Of Links On A Page Affect Ranking? by Jon Ricerca http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com Lots of research has focused on inbound links to a site, but little has focused on the number of links actually on a page (outbound or to other parts of a site). Many SEO gurus have recently been talking about something they call "PR Leak" which seems to be a theory that the more outbound links you have, the more your page rank on Google "leaks" away. That concept isn't found in the academic papers published by the founders of Google, but does seem to be accepted by a majority of SEOs. I decided it was time to take a look at the number of links present on a page and how that number correlates with ranking. The methodology: I gathered the results of the queries that were naturally performed last month by myself and three associates using the two leading search engines and analyzed them. I counted the number of links on the page (references to "href") and tabulated the results against the ranking of the URL in the search results. The tabulated results were finally converted into a normalized "ranking correlation." The results for each of the two leading search engines were kept separate so that we could discover any differences between the two leading search engines for this factor. The resulting graphs show the results for groupings of number of links normalized into a number between -100 and +100 showing the likelihood of being ranked higher/lower. A value of +100 shows that all 10 rankings were in the proper order to show that pages of the studied value ALWAYS rank HIGHER than pages of another value. A value of -100 shows that all 10 rankings were in the proper order to show that pages of the studied value ALWAYS rank LOWER than pages of another value. Numbers in between show the varying likelihood of rankings proportionally between - 100 and +100. That is the number you see on the Y-axis. On the X-axis, we have the number of links found. They are grouped into sets of 10 in order to increase the statistical significance with the amount of data we had available to analyze. Here are the graphs for the two leading search engines: http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com/graphs/dey01.gif http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com/graphs/deg01.gif The number of links were grouped in this way in order to increase the number of data points available. Unfortunately it also reduces the precision of the results. One is able to see that 91-100 links rank much higher than 1-10 links, but you are unable to see if 77 links rank differently than 79 links (for example). The result is very conclusive. Both leading search engines rank pages with more links much higher than pages with fewer links! Once again, it appears that the SEOs touting the "PR Leak" theory are simply wrong. If their theory held any weight at all, we should see the exact opposite. Pages with more links should rank lower on average. Notes: 1. There was no exercise to attempt to isolate different keywords. I merely took a random sampling of the queries performed by myself and three associates during the month. 2. This is merely a correlation study, so it cannot be determined from this study whether the leading search engines purposefully entertain this factor or not. The actual factors used may be far distant from the factor we studied. Jon Ricerca is one of the leading researchers and authors of the Search Engine Ranking Factor (SERF) reports at SearchEngineGeek.com. For access to the other SERF reports, please visit: http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com