Google threatens all the time to penalize links gained solely for the purpose of increasing rankings - but really, they are only making such threats against this as they know that really that can not take such drastic action. They are just trying to buy some time to get themselves out of this pickle they created by putting so much weight on links, rather than engineering a cleverer way to rank websites. Its there own fault in my opinion and something you could tell from Matt Cutts tone of voice from SES they where worried about at Google, and no doubt working on. In the meantime though, I imagine they will come up with somethine clever, similar to the sandbox to detect unnatutal linking, or rather unnatural link rate.
this is a very good thread and I have to say that if you do something for the sole purpose of gaining rankings, it can backfire. Buying links is not a good idea, buying directory listings or advertising on a page that is likely to bring you business, chances are that those common sense moves will bring you a lot further long term speaking. This is what Google is saying officially http://www.google.com/technology/index.html
What is the difference in buying an advertisement on such and such a page and buying a text link from the same page, except that you will possibly get more visitors direct from the page that contains an attractive advertisement? Are you talking about the same Google that publishes adwords on all its pages discounting paid links on other sites? Bit hypocritical isn't it (if its really happening?
people who sell links are often likely to take cash from "bad neighborhoods" which can hurt you by association ... I've seen it a lot of times.
The implication that those selling links are a bit on the dumb side is rather dubious IMO. Again IMO if you want to get the lowdown on what works and what doesn't regarding linking ask someone who places and monitors thousands of links to hundreds of sites every month.
Not on the dumb side but rather shady. I do know how well links work, even random ones and I do know what happens when a bad apple spoils it all. I also do know that you can be more effective with real links. I think link buying is shady and wrong. Any action that you take for seo should have another benefit other than increasing rankings. Otherwise, how are you going to explain yourself if a human editor comes by, how will you justify you strategy? Anyways ... I don't like the fact that newbies are reading this and being misguided into wasting time and energy without benefitting long term. It also taints search engine results. The focus should be on building quality sites that quality webmasters will want to link to so everyone will find what they are looking for online.
After reading the entire thread, I have come to a few conclusions: 1.As the index gets bigger, the way to provide relevant results has to change 2.The whole system IS flawed, but so is democracy, its about having 'best fit'. price vs speed vs accuracy. 3. Relevancy is about perception - How can anyone tell me who is the most relevant for the term "horse" "house" - infact there are only a few words/ combinations that can really be actually relevant..or that my property site is more or less relevant that someone has been online for 5 years. The real problem is that there is almost never going to be only 10 or 20 relevant results. Even as users get more savvy and use longer, more accurate search terms the problem is still there ie: "Where to buy a new house in the UK" - still throws up 9 mil results and on 20 are ever really going to get seen and they include Auctions, buyers guides, property companies and comparison sites. Result 121 is a UK based property discussion forum - once again, it seems very relevant to me. Which was I actually looking for ? - badly phrased questions produce bad answers and users will always make bad searches. I have people asking me what this means regularly: £ - mainly by US visitors. Some principles of the search algos cant change 1. On page can not be the only method used to rank sites - BLs (or a voting system is required) - you will never really be able to determine what is actually relevant with on page alone. G. realises that Big business MUST win, Do you really think G. can let Shawn be number 1 for "ebay" ? As soon as that happened everyone would think G. was broken - its about public perception. Backlinks are an essential way to keep it reasonably accurate MS can afford more BLs than me, So I cant beat them for "microsoft" - This to me actually makes complete sense. MS can never be dropped from the serps - no matter how much they spam. Imagine Amazon.com dropping from the serps ? how much money would be lost ? Wouldn't people at G. be fired left, right and centre, shareholder revolts. The web can no longer be a wild west in any form. There is much too much money + too much to lose. So although denied there must be plenty of manual adjusting and checking - so they dont drop a site by hand (or manipulate it) they write a little bit of code to do it for them - doesnt this class as machine generated rather than human ? For those that say "its easy to determine which is the real MS site" When companies are that big yes.. but as the size of the organisation shrinks this becomes much more difficult. The "miserable failure" scenario - is 1 of the problems with BLs. Pages should be forced to contain some relevancy to their backlinks. Even if it is in a natural language form (G. has adopted this - my site used to rank well for "buy blah blah" and now ranks well for "blah blah for sale" as well). As for buying/ selling links - searchenginewatch advertises text link brokers - and as long as you are not targeting serps only then I dont think its is a problem - I donated to the servers here - which I guess amounts to purchasing a not relevant text link. even if it was done because of the excellent tools. I have never bought any other links though - there are plenty of places to get links from already without paying. 2. Spam needs to be kept to a reasonable minimum. - Keeps the majority of results looking clean and the public + media satisfied. 3. PR, Webrank or MSNrank will remain in some form (whether the results you see on the toolbar are accurate or not) - I have never seen a site rank (since it was introduced) highly for a VERY competitive term without a pagerank of somekind. And with 2 identical pages the one with the best (most relevant, Highest PR, most bls, varied terms etc) back link structure will win. Otherwise, I would build a Digitalpoint and see where I could improve the densities, headings etc... even if I improved it by 1 word I should rank better. As far as skewed PR (toolbar) - it isn't, but it also isn't very accurate. Some egos need to be put in check here. Would G. provide a ranking rating for users just to confuse them and manipulate seos ? G. Says it is there to help a visitor decide if a site is quality. There can not be that many people actually checking/improving the results - between writing the algos, sending emails, customer/ client service, security, copywriters, hardware maintenance, making the tea, sweeping the floor. With all the "other" jobs that have to be performed even a big company can only dedicate a certain amount of resources to the accuracy of their results and compared to those trying to manipulate them they are severely outnumbered. There are only 3 search engines (no offence to the others, but there is). They all provide similar results (considering they have an index of billions). In the UK there are 5 television channels and none of them provide any kind of free ads or anything of the sort - Also, as mentioned Demographics play a much bigger factor than relevancy for the ads shown. Once there is enough decent competition (at the moment most people I know that run small businesses, either dont have a site or just about and have never heard of SEO. If I'm lucky they want to be IN the search engines !). Once search use has been properly entrenched (in the OS) and user loyalty is fixed. Then all results will be advertising. This is not far off and until then "patched" results will do and optimizers will continue to be very useful. Most sites that have quality seo usually have great content, tidy code, good spelling/ grammer, industry standards and are often better than those that dont. The SEOs are making businesses money online, inturn increasing online investment, inturn earning G. more why change this winning formula until you are locked in ? My 2 pence
Nice post Rounde This is a nice idealistic attitude, but it simply is not in accord with the real world, where there is simply no practical way for a search engine to differentiate between a paid advetisment and a free one, a paid link and a free one or a link returned as a favor in return for a link (reciprocal link) You are certainly welcome to your opinion but the search engines job is to provide relevant results to searchers. Can you please explain to me how having links that point to my page for no other reason than to rank well makes my page any less relevant? Thats a beautiful theory no doubt, but I see absolutely no substance in your statement above. IMO the way a site gets links has absolutely nothing to do with the relevancy of the page, and newbies are not being mislead, rather they are learning the facts of ranking well as opposed to wishful thinking. The simple fact is that the power behind the ranking algos of all the big three search engines is links and if you want to rank well you have to have them. The concept that if you build a beautiful and informative site users will come and link to it is poppycock. How are the users going to know about that great site in lower mongolia which is the definitive source on breeding Mongolian ponies if it ranks #5,342,100 in Google? The graveyards of the internet are littered with the bones of companies who espoused the "build it and they will come" theory
Mel's theory has holes in it, because that spoof site that had the cartoon on Bush and John Kerry came out of no where because of unique content that folks wanted to see and not because of SEO Did the Victoria's Secret webcast of the underwear catwalk with sexy models need SEO to bring so many visitors in that the servers crashed?
You need to be a bit more specific Anthony, give us a link to the site and I'll see if I can't poke some holes in that theory too. I suspect it did not have to do with the general webmaster public all putting links on thier sites, but rather as the result of blog entries. But then blogs are a very effective ranking tool. BTW I did not say that SEO was the only way that sites could rank well, but that if you build it and expect others to come because it is so good you are in for a disappointment.
No Mel, what you said was this, if one builds a great site that you MUST have SEO to bring traffic in which is not the case. Google did not need SEO to get Google up and running.
What have you been smoking Anthony? The closest I can find to what you said is Links and SEO are two different things, though I do agree that SEO uses links.
I have not been smoking anything, but after reading your post it feels like someone just blew 5 shotgun blasts of some good pot in my face Mel
It does when I have to work sometimes NC, but with some of these members I would like to take a shotgun to my own head many times and put an end to this never ending torrent of crazy ideas that folks come up with