Links are now devalued. Page-rank is under attack and the attackers are winning. It won't be long before Google itself is infested. Tim Bray is right, below, it's time for Google to get on top of this. They're both the victimizer and the victim. The spammers found a huge hole in Page-rank. You could drive a truck through it. I was the early warning system on this, the canary in the coal mine. They don't like to listen to me, maybe they'll accept Verisign's help. So says Dave Winer at Scripting NewsThe larger implications I will leave for the general forum. What does this imply for adsense and the process of driving traffic to your site with non-spammy back linking. My sense is that it is important for webmaster to be looking at strategies which are not as dependent on Google as most of us have become. Two reasons: first, there is every chance that to kill the spam Google is going to have to make a radical change, or series of changes in its algo and the application of that algo. Second, increasingly, people are going to become less search engine dependent and will look for other methods of finding what they want. But what strategies. Anyone have any thoughts? My own situation is that I am sandboxed so Google is not a big factor. But to generate traffic (35K Page views today...Yeah!) I have a group of webmaster who circulate their updates on an email list. Is this an option which can work outside the "pretty girls wearing very few clothes" world? What other ways are there for webmasters to alert other webmasters about new content and swap traffic around?
Google mainly uses the PR system, so webmasters will find ways to gain PR for them to gain more visitors coming from search engines.. And the result, SPLOG.
People aren't going to just abandon search engines altogether. Google is full of smart people that are always trying to close the loopholes that spammers are opening. That said, your question is how do webmasters come up with an alternative source of traffic. Well, that question has been asked time and time again. If I had all the answers, I'd be rich, or perhaps selling an ebook. Your suggestion of an email list is good, and although I don't think I've ever signed up for a newsletter, I bet it does the job of reminding visitors about your site. On the topic of incoming links, it's funny that these days links to your site are more important to your pagerank than to the fact that there are potential visitors that would arrive from the links themselves. Let's say you had tons of incoming links, and that greatly improved your search engine ranking. You're doing well, then all of a sudden Google announces, "Sorry, the spammers are just too good for us. We're closing up shop." Oh no, there goes all the search engine traffic. Well, hopefully all those links you've gathered over the years are still bringing in traffic, and if they aren't, then maybe they weren't that great in the first place.
PR has little bearing on SERP as aeiouy said. And Google has sort of addressed the problem by devaluing Pagerank. Pagerank doesn't drive traffic to your website, your rankings do.
Well, the best way to advertise is by being creative. being short sighted is never a good thing. If you brand yourself well, you can get thru setbacks easily. One of the biggest examples is seoinc. They have been banned by Google but their business kept growing in the meantime (they are back now). Too many people depend on Google and whine when they drop. The best thing to do is to be passive aggressive with G. If you have too much energy, go pay per click or ask Bob Mutch for his list of 1,000s of directories (happy submitting ).
First off, Google is not going to be able to get rid of Spam any more than the RIAA or MPAA will stop people from filesharing. Spam, whether you love it or hate it, is a technology that is a consequence of the internet. It would be stupid for Google to scrap page rank in order to attempt to stop it. If Google gets rid of page rank, how can someone tell the difference between a brand new site and a three year old site other than traffic. Not only that, if Google where to scrap page rank right now, the webmaster industry would face a depression in parallel with what happened to the stock market here in the US in 1939. I know webmaster online who make hundreds or thousands a month from text link ads. If Page rank goes, their income goes. Having said that, I want to get out from under reliance on Google as much as anyone. The answer is to focus on non conventional marketing strategies. I wrote a very long and detailed article on a new marketing strategy here at DP, but only one person commented on it. It is about marketing via filesharing and my theories about it. If you are interested in reading it(a very long post) you can click this link:http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=31915