seo_joe - 9:08 pm on Feb 7, 2007 (gmt 0)

AndyA said: And I guess I don't understand how a link from an unrelated site could be beneficial. Didn't Google just roll out anti-Googlebombing to put a stop to this? So if you have a totally unrelated site about hair rollers, and it links to your Widget site, assuming a Widget has nothing to do with hair rollers, how could that be helpful?

This is very interesting to me because I think one of my sites has a lot of backlinks from theme-related pages but on unrelated sites. If Google applies this Local Rank by taking the top 1000 results and then only counting the backlinks that occur within those results and then applies the anti-googlebombing algo which may also discount links from unrelated sites then a lot of our links would be discounted.

Our rankings dropped for all search terms that we were ranked high for but some that we weren't ranked high for did rise a bit but still aren't anywhere to bring traffic. Earlier we had a drop but it was only on some datacenters and then came back but now it's across datacenters so I'm worried it's a real penalty.

Another question about local rank: In a competitive industry, would it not be unusual to have competitors linking to each other? So if you take the first 1,000 results on a search term, let's say in a very competitive industry, if those pages are all competing companies, it would be unusual to find a lot of linking to competition going on. After all, if you're trying to sell insurance, you don't want to refer visitors to another insurance site. So, how would local rank be applied in this case? It would seem very few peer sites would be linking to each other.

I've heard many times that linking between competitors is not natural and to stay away from it. On the other hand, there will be a lot of related sites that aren't competitors within those top 1000 results like informational results and trusted directories, for instance, where it is important to have a link from because you want links from places that talk about your industry which should come up somewhere in the top 1000.

My site's rankings all dropped this past Monday Feb 5th across all datacenters. Did anybody else see this? It seems like everyone else was hit before.