The Truth about linking -- Dirk Johnson

Actually if you look at the date this thread was started, I was suspect of it then, NOW==> Really don't want to comment till I hear what GuyFromChicago has to say .

 

Yeah, I was wondering why it got resurrected.

 

The guilty party is right here. It doesn't bother me because this subject is always changing and opened for debate .

 

Yes, I think this is right. For example, human edited, quality directories (hubs) with carefully selected links can do well in Google, long term. This can be seen in practice, not only in the hub-authority model.

SEO theories based on the old PageRank equation and not on real case data seem to forget that Google search engineers' job is to permanently modify and try to improve their algorithms to get the most useful search results.

So better we follow #1 Google's advice:

 

From what I gather, this thread is now close to 2 years old.
Has anything changed?
We get quite a lot of link exchange requests and I need to decide whether to recommend that we give it more attention - link-exchange requests, that is.

We are currently a low-ranked site coz we're new but we have a huge amount of content and it grows by the day, that's why I think many are interested in exchanging links.

Another problem is the time to manage : who really does link back to us, etc.
From the article, it seems its not really important. Or did I misunderstand?

 

More and More People should be reading this thread - *bump*

 

Is Dirk saying recip links are just as good, if not better than one-way links? Is there anyone else that agrees with this?

 

Well that's pretty funny, I just went to google and thought I'd dig up more info on this so I type search query 'the truth about linking' and this thread came up #1 ...so it must be true .

 

I found this article and posted it to this thread two years ago come March. At the time there were many people saying that reciprocal links had no value and I thought they were wrong and that they had no proof. However since then I have had reason to believe that reciprocal links may not have the value they once had. I beleive that Google is probably devaluing them to a certain extent.

Despite this I am still actively building reciprocal links to many of my sites. It seem to me that what we thought was the proper optimization for Google two or three years ago now works very well for MSN. In the meantime I don't think that reciprocal links necessarily hurt you with Google. They just might not do you a lot of good.

So I know this email has really said nothing definitive, but I challenge anyone to make a definitive statement with proof about this subject.

 

I have always had the feeling that providing outbound links are good because it makes the site seem more trustworthy to vsitors. If a site complements information on your page and you feel it will help visitors by providing a link to a useful page then why should that be bad? The only reason why I resist putting too many outband links is because people may click on one of those instead of google ad.

 

Hi Bob- I can't really disagree with you on this one. My view on your observation about MSN is that they seem to be the last to follow more complexed algos to sort out what link really means. I think Bill could really care less about MSN search. In fact has has admitted defeat to Google for searching.

I am a strong believer that Google will always be first to do what is neccesary to stop false manipulation of Se's. The others eventually follow in order of search market share, so Y, M will follow in that order. I can see that Y is also wiser that MSN about linking strategies but not near Google. As much as I hate to admit it Google is getting harder and harder to find logic in algos . I am sure that's not a mistake .

 

The only question is are they throwing the baby out with the bath water? In other words while they may be successfully fending off all attempts to optimize are they also failing to present the most relevant pages?

I certainly have seen some search results from Google lately that did not provide what I would expect as the most relevant sites for the given search term.

I have always maintained that the objective of good optimization was simply to prove/illustrate the relevance of a web site. If I have a site selling widgets I don't want to be found for a search on "free sex". That may drive traffic to my site, but the traffic will never convert to sales. So my objective as a webmaster is to build the most releveant site possible for people who want to buy widgets, and my objective as an SEO practitioner is to help the search engines -- Google in this case -- understand that my site is relevant.

 

Compar,

I share your thoughts and sentiments, believe me. The problem is that G is too hungry for $. For example, if G were to can any site, and I mean any site, exclusively made for Adsense with less than 80% original content then we would get good searches. They have PR at least start a new metric BF (bottom feeder) and show all other content sites before these BFs.

The other thing is PR, its useless, totally useless. If they want to come up with something like this, then do so but don't make it public. Screw it. If you need to rely on PR to figure out whether or not you want a link from/to a site then there is something seriously wrong with humanity. I bet you $100 bucks that if they were to hide PR and let individual folks make an individual decision to link or not link then the results would get better.

I get totally frustrated when I spend days looking for a specific partner to link to and all I get is garbage/black hat crap. You know, I'm starting to use other engines now and am findings tons and tons of little sites that have a PR0 but are great informational and content peices. Thats how we should be doing links, not using some automated software that searches out all high PR sites. The best thing google could do is get rid of visible PR.

Look at the feeding frenzy going on in the PR update thread..firstly it'll take you a few hours to get through the nonsense, (you can write lots of good content in that time) and then they sit there and watch it like the stock market -- oooh oohh its a 5 now, oohhhh back to 2 -- its madness. All that time they could be writing some decent content or finding some great content sites to link to/from ...

cheers
Frank

 

- Myth 3: "One-way" backward links count more than reciprocal links.

The author is wrong on this point. One-way links are more valuable than reciprocals. Every search engine is cracking down on people easily gaming their algo. Where do you think most of the "Lemmings" are getting backlinks? You guessed it, they are using unrelated crap link exchanges.

Think like a search engine, would you want to give sites a boost for this? Of course you wouldn’t and that’s why you are starting to see Google really crackdown on this.

Sure u can rank in MSN and Yahoo with spammy link exchange backlinks...but for how long? They will very soon start popping people for this and if this guy is such and expert he should know better and mention it.

Go get real links that have real traffic and actual value. Your backlink history should show how trusted you are not that you paid someone to submit you to 1000 directories or exchanged 5000 links with others.

Go get links from sites and pages that rank in the top few hundred for you phrases. Getting quality links from your neighborhood should be your goal.

 

Ok now i see this is a year or 2 old. Well then i wont even bother with why this one is also crappy advice as well. This is old and please dont use this guys advice - it will not help you longterm and is outdated bad advice.

 

I make a decent amount of money of crap link exchanges does that qualify me as a lemming?

I don't know probably long enough to re-coop the moeny I invested in building the links plus some.

Do have any proof of that at all?

 

Yes sorry it does. Look if your making money thats great and its easy to game MSN and Yahoo right now. However, by getting your admitted "crap" link exchanges you will be following the crowd right over the cliff.

What are you going to do then? Unless you want to churn and burn start building your backlinks like I mentioned above and you will position yourself for the future.

I just hate to see people get hooked into thinking link exchanges are a long-term approach. I would only do mass link exchanges on site I didnt care to lose. And i would be smart enough to at least do 3 way exchanges and ever more elaborate setups.

The more search engines progress they will be able to say...hey this guy has 10,000 links but only 100 are actually relevant. Hmm this is spam - chop chop chop.

Ask yourself, why would an engine give you a boost for a irrelevant link? Link exchanges are going the way of FFA pages - my advice is dont got down with them.

NOTE - in some rare cases it makes perfect sense to exchange with a great site. However, if its not good for your users - its obviously not good for the site, and this should be used sparingly.

 

It funny you mention that , I have actually tested 3 way link exchanges vs regular link exchanges and have yet to see any real differenece.

 

when do you think this cliff is coming? I heard people say the same thing you are saying for about 4 years now.

 

Because if you read the patents that are coming out you can see how they plan to combat this. The whole point of engines using backlink analysis is that it’s a measure of the sites popularity in its community. The reason they went away from ranking on-page factors highly is because it’s easily controlled/manipulated by the webmaster.

They want an independent view of your site not your biased view...so they measure backlinks. Well with link exchanges and off topic links people can gather a ton of backlinks/votes for their sites. The engines do not like this for the same reasons they didn't like keyword stuffing. Its just 2 easy to manipulate.

So now the engines are moving towards only counting trusted categorical links. I mean why would they want to give your baby crib site credit because bob's discount tires links to it? So I am just saying position your site for the future, if you want make throw away sites to game MSN and Yahoo while it last, but on your main site I would be building long term strategies.