SEO Guru WANTED!
- Thread starter Denis
- Start date
Ahh.. phew I was a little worried!
BTW, check out http://www.seobook.com/archives/001792.shtml for a pretty comprehensive list of link building techniques.
marketingweb
Top Contributor
I personally think there is a lot of smoke and mirrors in what Google says compared to how they actually operate. Google takes a lot of notice of the inbound link texts, but all this stuff about google understanding page theme/content is a load of rubbish. Yes, they do check to see if certain words about gambling and little blue pills etc are there, and they take into account sites with lots of random links to all sorts of stuff. BUT if someone linking to you has 3 or 4 links on a page only, and the anchor text matches what you are about, the rest of the page content doesn't really matter very much.
For instance - the main keyword of the company I work for in my "day job" is in an ultra competitive phrase online, the sort of phrase where everyone in the top 30 or so "gets" seo, and are all frantically trying to out-seo each other. We normally sit about the bottom of page 1 for the main key phrase - lets call it "blue widgets" (Reason we aren't higher is have only been doing SEO properly for the website for a short time as boss has finally seen reason only recently - was ranked 578th - page 57 - when I started working on it).
Now about 7 of the top 10 ranked sites in our industry have thousands of blatent paid links coming to them. As an example, the number 3 ranked company (who had a meteoric rise) has links from a huge number of sites that are not only completely unrelated to "blue widgets" but are not even in english (even when translated they are irrelevant)! They are mostly blogs and small businesses on any topic you can imagine and in a lot of cases the only two english words on the page are "blue widgets", in size 8 point somewhere inconspicuous, the rest of the page being in arabic, thai, russian, you name it.
Not only have google not realised this is an issue and devalued the links, but their rise has been on the back of it. And to the "google will find out eventually", well if their algorithm doesn't pick it up automatically and ignore the links (which it doesn't), the changes of them doing anything is next to nill EXCEPT for a few companies they manually find and them "make an example of" to discourgage others. I reported these paid links to google a couple months ago via the specific tool they have in the "webmaster tools" section to allow you to report page links and no action or response even then.
THAT SAID: 95% of the time you won't have to resort to this sort of thing, as most industries in Australia are not as competitive as this example. OR you can build just as many links by doing clever stuff like link bait when basic SEO principles don't give the results you want. I'm not advocating buying this type of links, it's not the methods I use nor is it the only way, just pointing out that lots of people are doing it successfully without penalty. Most with experience in SEO will tell you that following the google guidelines to the letter and succeeding is tough when 99% of SEO's (even white hatters) are breaking them in some small way.
Matt
Marketing Web
http://www.marketingweb.com.au
For instance - the main keyword of the company I work for in my "day job" is in an ultra competitive phrase online, the sort of phrase where everyone in the top 30 or so "gets" seo, and are all frantically trying to out-seo each other. We normally sit about the bottom of page 1 for the main key phrase - lets call it "blue widgets" (Reason we aren't higher is have only been doing SEO properly for the website for a short time as boss has finally seen reason only recently - was ranked 578th - page 57 - when I started working on it).
Now about 7 of the top 10 ranked sites in our industry have thousands of blatent paid links coming to them. As an example, the number 3 ranked company (who had a meteoric rise) has links from a huge number of sites that are not only completely unrelated to "blue widgets" but are not even in english (even when translated they are irrelevant)! They are mostly blogs and small businesses on any topic you can imagine and in a lot of cases the only two english words on the page are "blue widgets", in size 8 point somewhere inconspicuous, the rest of the page being in arabic, thai, russian, you name it.
Not only have google not realised this is an issue and devalued the links, but their rise has been on the back of it. And to the "google will find out eventually", well if their algorithm doesn't pick it up automatically and ignore the links (which it doesn't), the changes of them doing anything is next to nill EXCEPT for a few companies they manually find and them "make an example of" to discourgage others. I reported these paid links to google a couple months ago via the specific tool they have in the "webmaster tools" section to allow you to report page links and no action or response even then.
THAT SAID: 95% of the time you won't have to resort to this sort of thing, as most industries in Australia are not as competitive as this example. OR you can build just as many links by doing clever stuff like link bait when basic SEO principles don't give the results you want. I'm not advocating buying this type of links, it's not the methods I use nor is it the only way, just pointing out that lots of people are doing it successfully without penalty. Most with experience in SEO will tell you that following the google guidelines to the letter and succeeding is tough when 99% of SEO's (even white hatters) are breaking them in some small way.
Matt
Marketing Web
http://www.marketingweb.com.au
soj
Founder
You've made some great points Matt, though I would like to add a little. If you think about it, no matter what link your site has, it can't be bad for your rankings. The way I figure this is, Google can't demote your site in the results because you have a link from a completely irrelevant, or spammy site. If this were the case, I could setup a load of spammy sites and link to all my competitors in the page 1 results, bring them down a few notches, and what happens, my site then rises in the ranks. That is my belief that you can't have bad links, but only links of positive value, whether they are high value based on page rank, anchor text, whatever, to low value (possibly no value) based on unrelated content, bad anchor text, or spammy sites.
marketingweb
Top Contributor
Hi Soj,
I 99% agree with you and I think we are very much on the same page - some people are wayyyy to paranoid about bad links that they miss a lot of opportuntities, and 99% of the time the worst that will happen is the links being ignored as you say.
That said, Google's own information USED to say "there is nothing a competitor can do to damage your google ranking". They then changed it a couple years ago to "there is ALMOST nothing...", which in my book is the same as something. There was a lot of discussion about it at the time on various forums, and the phase from the horse's mouth can be seen here:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en-uk&answer=34449
What google WILL penalise for is "unnatural linking patterns". This penalty is though MANUALLY penalising (making an example of) sites where it sees this -which has definately been proven to happen. I for one though don't think their algorithm picks it up as it isn't as advanced as they make out, so you have to be a combination of unlucky and very successful to get in trouble for it.
So to damage a competitor (in my opinion) you would have to establish this unnatural pattern, dob them in, and then perservere while they get a lot of good traffic and rank above you for months, in the hope that eventually google might get around to noticing your complaint, take it seriously, and then penalise them. All of which are very little odds of happening and would not be worth it, hence the almost!
Hope this adds a tiny bit to the conversation rather than just complicating things!
Matt
http://www.marketingweb.com.au
I 99% agree with you and I think we are very much on the same page - some people are wayyyy to paranoid about bad links that they miss a lot of opportuntities, and 99% of the time the worst that will happen is the links being ignored as you say.
That said, Google's own information USED to say "there is nothing a competitor can do to damage your google ranking". They then changed it a couple years ago to "there is ALMOST nothing...", which in my book is the same as something. There was a lot of discussion about it at the time on various forums, and the phase from the horse's mouth can be seen here:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en-uk&answer=34449
What google WILL penalise for is "unnatural linking patterns". This penalty is though MANUALLY penalising (making an example of) sites where it sees this -which has definately been proven to happen. I for one though don't think their algorithm picks it up as it isn't as advanced as they make out, so you have to be a combination of unlucky and very successful to get in trouble for it.
So to damage a competitor (in my opinion) you would have to establish this unnatural pattern, dob them in, and then perservere while they get a lot of good traffic and rank above you for months, in the hope that eventually google might get around to noticing your complaint, take it seriously, and then penalise them. All of which are very little odds of happening and would not be worth it, hence the almost!
Hope this adds a tiny bit to the conversation rather than just complicating things!
Matt
http://www.marketingweb.com.au
FirstPageResults
Top Contributor
What about "Google bowling"?
What if overnight I spammed 100k links to your site? Or linked from bad neighbourhoods which have porn, malware and warez? Depending on the authority/trustworthness of your site that could have an impact on your rankings, albeit momentarily.
It can even work in reverse. What if I posted a link that was later redirected to some malware? Your site might be reported to stopbadware and you may lose rankings until the site is deemed safe again.
Not that you would intentionally harm your own site, but there are plenty of ways to harm others!
Edit
I don't condone these sorts of things
Last edited:
soj
Founder
Apparently all it takes is a donation to Joel Olsteens Church!
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=6efb1d71c726d6f7&hl=en
In all serious though, there is the point where you have someone sending thousands of links your way from malwarez sites or whatever. The real discussion here is are links that you are building going to harm your search results. And for those that are trying to build links, unless your getting thousands of links from malwarez sites, you won't be harming your rankings.
Thanks for all the feedback/chatter...its been great.
I have attached an image for the next questions.
How does a website get all those smaller links. (Almost like a footer)
Dont know how to explain it any better...but please look at the google results for the first place.
For some reason the forum wont display images...so here is the link to the image: http://yfrog.com/j3eg1ej
I have attached an image for the next questions.
How does a website get all those smaller links. (Almost like a footer)
Dont know how to explain it any better...but please look at the google results for the first place.
For some reason the forum wont display images...so here is the link to the image: http://yfrog.com/j3eg1ej
FirstPageResults
Top Contributor
the are called site links. you need to consistantly rank #1 for the term and have some authority, there is no set formula to achieving these but here is a rough guideline a put together some time back:
http://www.totalinternet.com.au/art...How-to-get-Google-Sitelinks-for-your-website/
http://www.totalinternet.com.au/art...How-to-get-Google-Sitelinks-for-your-website/
Denis, have a read of http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=47334
