Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I'm waiting for my cleaner to propose a link swap with her universal cleaner's directory.
We depend on those links because search engines use them to decide who'll get the biggest pieces of the traffic-cake.
I caught myself dreaming up a couple of questions:
what if all links were devalued tomorrow morning?
what would I do to get traffic instead?
what would/could a next generation SE use instead of link popularity?
what would happen if the top three SEs were to shut down tomorrow morning? Would they be replaced by second-tier SEs or something completely new?
Happens on a frequent basis. Not ALL links, but a great many. Part of this is link rot. The other part can be any number of things that I'm not going to point to.
It has occurred in the past that many WebmasterWorld members have simultaneously felt a drop in link pop. The opposite happened at the beginning of this year.
>>>what would I do to get traffic instead?
Rely on your backlinks. If you have relevant partners then your partners will send you traffic. Beyond that there are other strategies to increase word of mouth including tell-a-friend, syndicating articles, press releases, etc.
>>>what would/could a next generation SE use instead of link popularity?
Link popularity probably isn't going away. It will likely persist in one flavor or another.
but what happens with links right now reminds me of dutch tulips, dot-com stock and the like.
They are worth something, but not because of their intrinsic value. The value comes from many people wanting them.
Just like you I believe link pop is here to stay. But that's probably what people thought about meta tags not too long ago.
Governments could hold an auction for pagerank. Everybody can bid for a 10, a 9, an 8 ,..... According to the size of the population there's e.g. 5 tens, 50 9 s, 500 8s, ... . .edu get them for free.
You want more PR? You pay more. Just imagine the german finance minister finds out he can rake in 20 million a year for a "PR10 - licence", 2 Million for a 9. 20% go to Google. They lose nothing, get extra cash, can sell more adwords.
"Unfair!" Yes, but so what.
"Yeahbut, the competition will blow Google away for doing this." Hmmm. Maybe the governments will declare Search engines not using government-regulated pagerank as illegal. Outrage?
Just one scenario that could make away with unneccessary links (those that are only here for pagerank).
It took me about 3 weeks to recover from Florida, in the end im not sure if it was tweaking or the algorithm was self correcting...
It's intersting dealing with challenges like this, because theres like this big wall you cant see over, you throw some stuff over it and get some back and try to figure out how the heck the person (program?) on the otherside decided what to throw you.. hopefully if your good its usually a bone ;)
It's intersting dealing with challenges like this, because theres like this big wall you cant see over, you throw some stuff over it and get some back and try to figure out how the heck the person (program?) on the otherside decided what to throw you.. hopefully if your good its usually a bone ;)
I didn't want to argue or complain. And I like your wall-analogy a lot.
I was just trying to draw some controversy so we can cook up some fresh ideas as to what the future will look like.
And I think there's not so many options, because the SEs have to model something like a perfect site - they are not free in their decisions or they'll dig up garbage.
So, if you sit back for a while and try to find out what a perfect site looks like (or what MS & Co might think it looks like) and how it is connected to the outside world - and then compare this to what comes up in the SERPS now, we might find THE idea.
The other questions is: would anybody want to share it instead of selling it to Google ;)
