Hissingsid - 10:46 am on Jun 2, 2008 (gmt 0)

I'm noticing the rapid rise of a few sites in the google.co.uk serps. On investigation using Yahoo site-explorer it looks like shear volume of backlinks of any quality trumps a lower number of quality links.

So the Webmaster tools advice of:

How can I improve my site's ranking? In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.

is clearly misleading for the UK. Whoever has been playing with the UK geo filter recently seems to have turned off the "high quality" bit of the algorithm. Thus creating a field day for webmasters who exploit the low pay rates of 3rd World SEOs.

Since it is generally agreed that being linked to (except in certain extreme situations) cannot harm your site should we all be paying someone $200 to get 400 links from dodgy directories?

Cheers

Sid