I have come across websites saying that link buying / selling is now penalized by google, link exchanges are not good, links & anchor text are not as important as they used to be... all around one central indea: Google is changing its algo and the indicators we used to track (PR, TR...) are now almost useless. Now here are the facts. From my own experience, nothing has really changed: I have a high quality PR5 established website about 2 years old and have not seen any changes in traffic for the last 9 months. I didn't care about that as I thought it had reached its traffic potential, big mistake! Lately (august & september) I decided to take the time to get back to the basics. Here is what I did: - submitted and was included in a popular & old & trusted PR7 directory. - SOLD two links on my homepage - got some links from PR 2/3/4 directories (about 10) - improved internal linking - tweeked some titles and on-page optimization for some pages (2% of the site) As a result, I have been surprised to see my traffic doubling! I cannot say to what extent each of the above actions has participated in this traffic increase, but I can certainly say that: - what used to work is still working (SEO, natural link building...) - selling links is not (yet?) penalized by google Now I did see a similar increase in traffic (+30%) last year at the same periode of time, so site / domain age may have played a role in that. I also believe that google has updated and is constantly updating its parameters (PR, TR, XR ...) even if they are not exported to the toolbar, so don't be worried if you don't see your new PR, keep working and you shall see results. Comments and others experiences would be appreciated.
good work.... selling links is penalised by the almighty google but google can not determine from paid and normal links. Within the algorithm they have a way to determine sold links though. COmpletely unrelated links, links in a line (bout 5) and linking to low quality websites from a high one can do bad things.
Google is making things worst when they said that link exchange is not good! I have heard that google will not vary on pagerank when it comes to the SERPs it will depend on the age of the site or the trust of google for it!? Is this true? Can someone give me a proof source or article for that! thanks,
Yep good points here... Now if someone sells completely unrelated links I think he deserves to be penalized because that's just stupid. Anyway thanks for your input guys
Actually that's a myth: Myth: Your site will be banned if you buy links. "This one does have some roots in reality, as Google (specifically Matt Cutts) likes to scare people about this. They rightly don't want to count paid links as votes for a page if they can figure out that they are paid, but they often can't. Even if they do figure it out, they simply won't count them. It would be foolish of them to ban entire sites because they buy advertising on other sites."
I'm the one who always thought that they will never penalize buying link or selling links sites. Because i believe they wont check every single site whether they are selling or buying links or not. They might can do it but not in the short coming time.
That is flat out wrong! Links are more important than ever. The basic SEO fundamentals still work. A spideable site with plenty of votes is going to rank. While you can certainly get more complicated with SEO, that statement pretty much covers it. This is DEAD wrong. Google CAN DETECT PAID LINKS. When Text Link Center gets passed BETA mode, we'll be launching our Paid Links Checker Tool. Now Google can not detect ALL paid links (or I'd have so reason putting the 2 zillion hours into programming Text Link Center) and that's kind of the entire premise behind my need site. Brandon