Forum Moderators: martinibuster
*As these indexing changes have rolled out, we’ve improving how we handle reciprocal link exchanges and link buying/selling.*
*If you were getting crawled more before and you’re trading a bunch of reciprocal links, don’t be surprised if the new crawler has different crawl priorities and doesn’t crawl as much*.
[mattcutts.com...]
This is going to stop many webmasters being so generous with their outbound linking and will surely lead to an increase in paid links.
What I did deduce from it is that if you have the word "resources" on your pages, these links may not get crawled.
The irrelevancy factor may just highlight the fact that they are reciprocal links, if not we're all in trouble ;-)
reciprocal linking encourages webmasters to get lazy, and ultimately the end user suffers. your user could care less about your "partners page", primarily because the links on there were obtained from webmasters looking to game the engines. typically they are presented in a haphazard fashion, with little or no relevancy to what the user is looking for.
reciprocal linking makes the web messy and less relevant.
site owners should focus on providing their users with relevant resources. link to additional related resources, irregardless of the PR of the link, or whether or not they give you a return link. your users will appreciate it, and in time, the engines will reward you accordingly.
pay attention to providing your user with a valuable resource, and stop playing the reciprocal linking game. the web has moved on - you should too.
Google cannot theme at all, so this is bull and is an attempt to stop link networks and irrelvant linking.
No, real humans can not look at every single site indexed by Google. But they can certainly review sites reported to the SPAM department. (Such as the case with Matt's examples.) And it certainly wouldn't be too much of a stretch for the current technology to flag some suspect sites for manual review later.
Perhaps Google (the technology) can't.
I'd tend to think that Google's technology can detect this type of stuff. In reading the various patents Google has filed for over the years, this stuff should be easy for them to filter for.
There is much more to what Matt wrote and just focusing on this one bit would be an injustice just as it is claimed that Google is penalizing sites for this. There are going to be many other factors involved. If a site is using the strategies that Matt gives examples of, there are surely other signals throughout the site that would be filtered for.
What's happening here is those who have been heavily involved in irrelevant and relevant reciprocal link exchanges are feeling the pain right now. I mean, come on, one look at some of the site examples given and there are visible signs (footprints) all over the place. Look behind the scenes and it smacks you in the face.
This is what happens when you base your online campaigns solely on links, it's a risky strategy these days. Sure, it works, but for how long? For some, they may go undetected for years. For others, they will get caught up in the mass filtering that search engines will and are using. Google just happens to be leading the pack in this area and it probably won't be long before the others follow suit. That seems to be the natural progression, Google does something, then the others follow in some instances. Follow the leader.
P.S. If this is a scare tactic from Google, it's a pretty good one. Much of what Matt wrote aligns with documentation available out there supporting the claims.
Our site has not participated in any link exchange programs, we have no spammy stuff on our site..
Yet we where hit very hard..
Our site has not participated in any link exchange programs, we have no spammy stuff on our site..Yet we where hit very hard..
I have a feeling the odds are you are not looking hard enough or being objective enough about your own sites. The only pages I lost with this last update were ones that were either low quality or lacked high quality signals. Not having spammy stuff and not doing link exhanges isn't enough to get pages to be indexed in Google right now. To paraphrase a quote from Seinfeld show, you also have to have signals of quality to show your site is index-worthy. :)
Losing pages is a learning experience and often provides valuable clues to what Google thinks is or isn't a good page. Analyze the pages you lost compared to the pages that remained and look for patterns in the data. With my sites it is very clear and very reasonable criteria from Google's perspective as to what they think it worthy of keeping in their index.
It's hard to imagine why users of an eastern european real estate site would especially benefit from links to a site selling camcorders. Thus, I can easily see why Google might interpret those links as being part of a "scheme" contrary to their guidelines, or at least conclude that the links might have been placed there strictly for SEO purposes, and thus it might not want to treat those links as valid "votes".
Matt basically assumes that anyone looking at his examples will instantly see why these might be classified as "bad" links from Google's perspective.
How effective Google is at finding these types of "bad" links, and what it does about them when it finds them is left to our imagination.
In his blog entry, Matt is only talking about Big Daddy's more sophisticated crawl priorities, but it is easy to imagine that the same technology Google is using to detect "bad" links for crawl priorities can also be used to ignore the "bad" links for ranking purposes or -- worst case -- impose some sort of penalty or "negative trustrank" factor.
For site owners to get an accurate picture of the the root cause of their ranking drop due to Google's latest change, they would have to examine the IBLs of sites 3 or 4 link-jumps away from the ones directly linking in to their site.
If you're floating on an inner tube in the middle of the ocean and barely keeping your head above water, it makes no difference what section of the tube begins to leak. The only thing that matters is that Google has begun to deflate (re-distribute PR) the system.
( Que the arguement on PR distribution<G> )
Our site has not participated in any link exchange programs, we have no spammy stuff on our site.
Are you absolutely, positively sure? No link exchanges whatsoever?
Here is the thing, someone (martinbuster) just made me aware of a major issue.. I have never put any attention to it and will get working on it asap..
We show over 700 links to our site, that seems to be reciprocal links however as to my knowledge we have never participated in reciprocal linking, unless someone has done it for us.
So our site is linked from other sites, but we are not linking back to them..
How do I get rid of this?
[edited by: martinibuster at 8:20 pm (utc) on May 18, 2006]
[edit reason] TOS. [/edit]
So our site is linked from other sites, but we are not linking back to them. How do I get rid of this?
If you are not linking back to them, a reciprocal link, then there should be nothing to worry about in that area. If you hired someone and they performed this type of service for you, did you allow them access to your site? If so, have you looked for anything that might not be in order?
And no, there isn't much you can do with inbound links and that is why I believe that is a non-issue. Unless of course something changed in this latest crawl priority. Google has always stated that there is almost nothing that a competitor could do to harm your site. I would surely hate to think that inbound links alone would cause harm.
Are you certain that there are no technical issues with your site? Have you changed anything with hosting, the way your site is set up, etc. in the past 6-12 months? For a site that has been around for more than a couple of years, it would take something pretty severe for it to get wiped out in an update like that.
I don't see it as a third party doing harm potential, either. It's more about a campaign boosting the site, then getting caught and being brought back down to square one, where they started.
Certainly there are other things going on with that site, but my hunch is that it is related to the type of links the site is mixed up with.
It leaves so much to the imagination.....
We have other site linking to ours, some are open directories others are links from sites relative to our site.
Martinbuster, claims that these links are reciprocal links or thier is a third party linking, which I am not aware of.
Now I would need to clarify this although I don't know how..
I would want to get rid of these links only if they are reciprocal, if it's just inbound links I would like them to stay..
Anyone with the same scenario or with experience on this issue to help me out here?
If you have a widget site and you did a recipricol link with a site that has absolutely nothing to do with widgets and has outbound links to every topic imaginable, then yes, feel free to worry and even remove the link if you feel so inclined.
But if you have a site about widgets and recipricol links with a site about blue widgets, if all the other outbound links on the blue widget sites go to widget-related sites, don't lose any sleep over it.
According to Yahoo, we have over 2,000 inbound links for our main site, maybe a dozen of which were a result of recipricol links (and only because the other sites were related). I'm certainly not going to lose any sleep about it.
LifeinAsia, spot on. MC is using scare tatics. I know for sure once once your domain has trust, the links do not matter as long as links point at your site.
Amen, brother. I have 10 number on rankings on pretty competitive terms where the only tactic I ever used was recips. Plus, I will not take down the recips no matter what.
If Google ever knocks me out of the SERPS (which the do occassionally), at least I'll still have SOME traffic from the people who were kind enough to exchange links with me.
Amen, brother. I have 10 number on rankings on pretty competitive terms where the only tactic I ever used was recips. Plus, I will not take down the recips no matter what.
Same here...i have many clients who still have their recips in place and yet are maintaining their PRs and SERP's despite the updates.
but everyone around seems to be going "No recips" whatsoever. wonder whats the final release on this.
[edited by: martinibuster at 5:35 am (utc) on June 2, 2006]
[edit reason] Added quote tags. ;) [/edit]
I don't see any new sites popping up in the serps in competitive areas with only reciprocal links these days. Sure recips only will still probably work great if you have a site about the first ever "Crawdad Festival in Taylor County", but they simply are not going to get you very far for any terms where the existing sites in the first two pages of serps have 5,000+ backlinks, many of them one way.
