I would like to hear some opinions on this thought that came to me a few days ago. As most of you know, the Miserable Failure Google Bomb doesn't work anymore. Google supposedly catches those things algorithmically now. I figured there must be some sort of threshold of links with the same anchor text coming in to a site. As long as you have the words somewhere on that page (maybe even the page title) it should not trigger a google bomb, but I was wondering: The Anchor text in Forum signatures is always the same and the link always points to the same page. I was wondering if that could trigger some sort of Google Bomb penalty if someone had too many signature links. Here are some points of discussion: -Number of Signature links vs. Number of other links -Overall Number of Signature links -Trust of linked site -Keyword of page matches Anchor text Anyways, I would love to hear some feedback.
Good question! Will follow this thread. (I don't have the anwser) I always wanderd why google doesn't show forum links (of most forums). Yahoo and msn does!
I believe you can Google bowl a new site with no links with a forum signature if your have a significant number of posts.
I honestly don't know how they know what is a Google bomb and what isn't. I've seen links that have the same anchor text thousands of times that aren't marked as bombs. For example, John Chow's blog encourages people to use the anchor text "Make Money Online" or "Make Money On The Internet" when linking to it, and it has thousands of links. Some of the Google bombing may be stopped through manual means, and I have a sneaking suspicion that many bombs are stopped this way.
Well, general Wisdom is that you need to have the words that are used in the Anchor text on your website. I guess I should have asked: What will be the fallout of the Algo change to remove Google Bombs for mass links like signatures. Or what benefit (if any) do signatures still have? A natural linking profile uses all sorts of anchor texts, while the engines should figure out from the page itself what it is all about and rank it (in that respect the Anchor text shouldn't matter much). Anchor text is too easy to game I think, and I am wondering if having too many links all with the same Anchor can result in some sort of penalty. From the linking profile itself it should be apparent what is a signature link and what isn't. Since signature links are usually self promotion and therefore not really a "vote" for a site, Google might completely discount them.