Has Google Killed Linkbuilding after 2008/Q1?? There are a few other threads here on DP that are discussing the Q1 2008 PR update, and from personal experience I am wondering whether something really fundamental has changed with the world of SEO. Google has been harping on for some time about how the link sales economy is wrong, and sites that buy/sell will be penalised, but the issue there is that the internet being as large as it is, is totally impossible to police effectively, surely the best way to defeat the link sales for SEO/PR industry, is to make backlinks have nothing to do with PageRank. I would like to quote some examples.... My personal blog site, which has around 700 backlinks is a PR0. My corporate homepage with around 4,000 backlinks is a PR2 My free hosting service with around 40,000 backlinks (source google webmaster tools) is a PR0 My phpLD templates site, with around 10,000 backlinks is a PR3 A Marketing blog I write, with around 1,200 backlinks is a PR5 !!! Now, the only thing that I can extrapolate from these figures is that Pagerank all of a sudden seems to have less to do with the amount of backlinks that your site has. Is anyone else noticing this phenomena? I wonder if this strikes a fatal blow to the link selling industry, as lets face it, companies like text link ads are just taking adsense market share... which would explain the REAL reason for google to hate the link industry. Just my personal musings on the subject but I would be interested to hear others views! MOG
It started back in mid 2007 and Google has already changed the value of backlinks. Nowadays it is not the amount of backlinks that count, it is the relevancy and quality of the links. Related links between 2 sites are quality, meaning the contents in both sites are somehow related as well as the anchor text. You can have 20,000 or 30,000 links but if they are not related and completely out of point, they are just as good as rubbish links. You just need 100 plus plus quality links, together with other SEO factors such as onpage optimization, domain age, domain expiration to get PR3 -5. Seen many websites grew from nothing to something within a year with less than 2,00 links at that point of time. This thread is backdated.
google didn;t kill link building, it however killed paid link building tho. google is making it harder for everyone to manipulate SERP with paid links.
I agree and notice the same results.... 3 relevant links on crappy sites can be worth more than 1000 links now days. People just need to get out of the mind frame that more is better, because its not.
Quality links not the quantity of links... Even if you have plenty of links it doesnt count unless on the links it has some quality links that counts and the relevancy of it...
Actually if they are looking for quality links over quantity, I would say that it added to the value of paid links... on relative content pages.
Yes i would agree. But in order to be effective it would have to be contextual and those links are hard to buy.
In my opinion, they've not killed the art of link building, they've actually helped it rediscover itself. It's sickening to see so many posts promising millions of backlinks for a few dollars and more. In any issue, if you prefer quantity over quality, it's crap. So, with this PR update, Google has actually given one tight slap to those crappy webmasters who care two hoots about quality link building. It's good for the entire industry.
Yes, it is true. They haven't killed it just modified it to improve their SERP's. And now it is not more, but quality. Hence, a website which as 20 super quality backlinks can easily outdo a 1000 link backlinks. And that is not an exaggeration.