Matt Cutts Blog Entry.

[Mike]

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/indexing-timeline/


Worth a read talks about a lot of recent issues and also talks a bit about linking.

[Phil Staff]

Definately a great update article to read if you have questions about Google and how they index sites.

I loved the examples of the real estate site who complained their index dropped off and Matt shows *exactly* where they went wrong. In their footer they had links to Free Ringtones, and SEO contest and Omega 3 Fish Oil. Irrelevant linking at its best.
:(

Another great article from Matt. Thank you for posting that link!

[elliot]

In this same post, Matt states very clearly that sites "where our algorithms had very low trust in the inlinks or the outlinks of that site" can be penalized.

He goes on to say that "examples that might cause that include excessive reciprocal links, linking to spammy neighborhoods on the web, or link buying/selling."

As you know potential linking partners on Linkpartners.com all live in good neighborhoods and are not in the business of buying or selling links.

This is one of the big advantages of Linkpartners over automated link-generation sites. At Linkpartners, every site is evaluated by a human and sites supporting bad practices are not allowed to join.
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VAPORIZERS (http://vaporizers.tv/)

[nozzmoking]

He goes on to say that "examples that might cause that include excessive reciprocal links, linking to spammy neighborhoods on the web, or link buying/selling."

Matt seems to make all the right noises, but it would be nice to see some 'real-world' examples of Google penalising sites for the above-mentioned practises.

In my genre, for instance, there is a site that has been hovering in the top 10 for some time, at least a couple of years. The site recently purchased a load of incoming links and has shot straight to the no. 1 slot. The site in question has no content to speak of, no visible SEO just a bunch of un-related links (Google reports 12,000, so there are quite a few more out there). Google has also decided in it's wisdom to give the site a PR 7.

So you'll forgive me if I sound a tad sceptical when I read about what we should, and shouldn't do, as regards ethical linking practises. It just galls me when I think of the hundreds of hours spent on producing unique content, coupled with a 'straight' linking campaign, and then these guys just waltz into the no. 1 slot via their wallets.

Rant over! I'll just carry on doing what I've always done and hopefully it'll pay off in the long run.

[admin]

So you'll forgive me if I sound a tad sceptical when I read about what we should, and shouldn't do, as regards ethical linking practises. It just galls me when I think of the hundreds of hours spent on producing unique content, coupled with a 'straight' linking campaign, and then these guys just waltz into the no. 1 slot via their wallets.

Rant over! I'll just carry on doing what I've always done and hopefully it'll pay off in the long run.


That's a fair rant... and your ethical linking strategy will pay off in the long run after the junk sites get downgraded. Typically what we have seen is that some sites get a short term bump by obtaining a high volume of links from a service that guarantees X number of links for X price. But the search engines are onto those schemes and eventually, the site that "waltzs" into the #1 position will eventually get downgraded. Then your site will rise up in the rankings as the junk sites are downgraded. It's tough to reverse a downgrade if and when it happens.

From everything we are reading in the search marketing world these recent weeks (Google news alert "reciprocal linking (http://www.google.com/alerts?hl=en&q=reciprocal+links)"), reciprocal linking is still acceptable when done responsibily (linking to relevant quality sites).

The SE's are now trending how often you obtain links, the quality of those links, etc so as long as you obtain quality links in a manner that isn't excessive, and as long as you do not link out to junk sites, you won't give the search engines any reason to downgrade your rankings.

How do we define "excessive"? Sites that obtain a few dozen links a month is considered safe and acceptable based on the data we see from the thousands of websites who currently use LinksManager with success. Sites that obtain more than 75 links a month are borderline and if you obtain links at a much higher rate (100 or more a month), your links are likely to be more scrutinized by the SE crawlers. A site that obtains alot of links quickly and is topical such as a site documenting a major current news event probably won't have this problem because the SE's can differentiate between a site that is obtaining alot of links due to it being newsworthy. But if your site sells toasters or other common widgets and you obtain links too quickly, you are asking for trouble. See our article about Google's patent for more information on that. http://linksmanager.com/googlepatent.html

Let the junk sites that participate in the games get downgraded, and then your site should be able to maintain it's rankings positions if you are keeping it fresh with updated content.

And nozzmoking pretty sure you already know the following but for those of you who are new to the world of linking, keep in mind that it's not all about links.. Links are only one part of the equation. Content is still king and the SE's also trend how often you update your content, the value of that content, etc. So we recommend you add fresh original content/copy to your site every 2-4 weeks at a minimum. For more information on content building, see our article at http://linkpartners.com/article_contentisking.html.