Sorry AC I just don't see any references to these college professors and information industry experts in the article you posted the link to - can you please point the link out to me if it in fact exists? No AC when I want to punish myself I try to make sense of your posts, but please feel free to post some references it will be a delightful change. BTW I am not disputing the amount of information that may or may not be indexed as there is simply no way of knowing that no matter how expert you are, I am disagreeing with the idea that anything published must be 100% correct no matter what is said or who wrote it. I would be more impressed if you could provide me with the credentials of the writer of that story and it turned out that he actually had some.
Why don't you send an eMail to E-week Mel and tell them that they are not experts? When I have the time I will post more articles for you, but I am sure that if you do a search on these keywords: --------------------------------------------------------------- Percentage of information search engine index or search engines may be capturing as little as 1 percent of the Web ---------------------------------------------------------------- The above line was cut and pasted from my post on the e-week article. If you do these searches you will find the same articles that I will.
Sorry...I really don't want to break up this party, I am enjoying it Getting back to where we started. There was something said by Shawn: I have found the same thing. My theory is that real savy internet buyers will use the yahoo directory to find a good vendor quickly. I have always paid for my Yahoo listing for this reason. I think yahoo's directory is better that Google for b2b. For me (b2b products) Yahoo users convert the best.
Now why would I be buying links when I rank where I want to be already??? Its amazing how much angst is generated when you ask someone to back up their cherished theories with references and/or facts.
The power of SiteTutor is scary, every forum I go to, SiteTutor is online and posting somehow Makes one wonder how the guy makes a living
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1955 check post #2 and now lemme ask you this: why wouldn't link buying be looked down upon? You are creating rankings for reasons other than improvement of the site's quality. You are tricking search engines to believe your sites are popular when in reality they are not. You are tainting organic search results paying a link seller rather than paying Google for their adwords. You are pretty much abusing the system don't you think? And even worse you are bragging about it. Do what you have to do, just shut up about it. Anthony I know I spend way too much time here but I gain a lot of knowledge that I pass on to the right people. We are a web development company and my focus is generating sites that give good info, are well structured and therefor rank almost by default. Now about you, AC: I told you what you should do You have the energy to make a great living, now funnel it into the right direction ...
Lets go back to the basics for just a moment. The Holy Grail of search engines is relevancy and for that reason all search engine algos attempt to determine the relevancy of a page and rank that against all other pages that are relevant in some way for that term. They then serve those results to searchers who believe that this service not only reveals a lot of pages that they would never find on their own but ranks them so that they can find the best first. Adding links does nothing to affect the relevancy of a page for the user in any way. Is it gaming the search engines? Of course it is. Is it harmful to the searcher or the search engine? Not so long as the page is relevant to the search and provides the user what he is looking for. Is there only one page out of ten million that is the most relevant for a searcher? Of course not, there are probably hundreds or thousands that would suit the searchers purpose equally well. Is it wrong to push relevant pages to the top of the rankings with links? No more wrong than using a page title, a meta description tag or an H tag or anything else that the user does not see. Do morals come into search engine rankings? Not directly, I am almost certain that there are no moral ranking factors in SE algos. Think about this for a moment: If purchasing links resulted in penalties it would be a great way to get rid of your competitors. The search engines know that and most webmasters do too.
One can't prevent a site from pointing a link at his site, but if a pattern of identified links (100 known link farm links) are pointing at your sites, don't you think that would tell the SE's something Mel? Some directories that are nothing more than e-mail harvesting programs will be classified as link farms (especially those that require reciprocal links) and they seem to be all the rage Mel. Why are folks so quick to submit to every directory they can find? Who knows, maybe they don't know any better
Sure there might be some sort of pattern recognition that could trigger a good or bad response from search engines, but then all you do is mimic whatever linking pattern it takes to get the response you want. Perhaps a better question is why is a link you purchased from Yahoo for $299 per year considered by many as a "good" link and a link from another directory that only costs $40 a "bad" link? Whats the difference? The premise that a search engine can somehow determine the reason a link is on a site is pretty far out IMO, just about as far out as trying to determine the relevance of links.
Mel it is the pattern of known link farm links and other sites that have been identified as big link or PR sellers such as Search King was. If you have a lot of links from identified link sellers pointing to your sites then you should not wonder much when your site is dropped out of the index.
LOL - So if thats really the case I can get rid of all my competitors by mimicing that pattern of links I buy pointing to thier sites. Big link sellers create dozens of new sites each day, all on different servers and IP addresses. How do you identify them? Actually I do not worry much about my site being dropped from the index, it has been there for years ranking well and has survived all the catastrophic Google algo shifts so far. If I had implemented features to compy with all the latest theories I would have been dumped long ago IMO.
Did you ever study the Search King case when they were dumped for selling PR, how about the Blue Find case where their pages were dropped in PR Mel
Mel is now trying to justify certain grey-hat SEO practices like link-buying by asserting that it isn't immoral. and I notice that he has now removed the word "Ethical" from his anchor text -- interesting That was is a particularly dumb comment, Mel, even for you. In Google, links are of course one of the major factors that drives any page to the top but this thread was discussing the specific practice of purchasing links. If you insist on arguing for the sake of arguing, at least make an effort to stay on task.
Uh, yeah... right... have a look at what he ranks for here. Follow a link or two while you're there and you'll note that even those claims are rather inflated...
Sure did Anthony - SearchKing was dumped for selling PR, ie pricing thier advertisements by PR, not for selling ads or links. Bluefinds pages were dropped for similar reasons, but I still see Yahoo selling links for $299 each, but they make no guarantees about the PR you will get.