IITian - 12:04 am on Jan 28, 2004 (gmt 0)

It is likely that Google is not penalizing excessive links now, but what about the future? Consider it similar to kw density. Why is 70% density considered to be too high and 0.1% too low. Everything boils down to whether it is normal or not, ie what is the probability of an organic page dealing with a kw topic having a kw density of x. If it is too low, a reg flag is raised, especially if the kw density is too high. This probabilty is determined by statistics.

One mistake we make is that we think that we are free to make mistakes and if things don't turn out well we can always correct them. Unfortunately this is not true in many cases in SEO since it is quite difficult to undo certain things (can't ask everyone to unlink to us) and secondly, perhaps more imporantly, the history is recorded and can be used against us anytime Google has the resouces to put on it.

In another thread I have given the example of people renaming their links pages from links.* to something entirely different. Once Google has the data mining capabilities, it is going to mark these sites for ever - whereas the sites that didn't change their links page names - mostly the non-SEO ones, are going to be marked as non-SEO ones - like .gov, .edu sites and in due time will be rewarded.

Of course everything is hypothetical and speculative here, but given the competition and the main impediment to good search - SPAM - I won't be surprised if sophisticated algorithms are implemented within a couple of years. (Currently, I think their algorithm is quite primitive and has really caused lots of uncertainty for many.)

No amount of clothing is going to "cover" the fact that Google has seen us naked.