Blue on Blue Links - Why?

[Aberdeen]

I was checking out my competitors sites recently and noticed an interesting thing. At the bottom of somones page he had a number of links the same color as the background. Nothing revolutionary there I know, but ...

Say our keyword was Panda (its not)
He had links to Panda Security, Panda Travel, Panda Condoms, etc, etc, etc. Nothing related to our fields, but all with a pagerank of 5 and above. I know google likes you linking to pages with a higher page rank in the same field as you, but does it mean that google does not actually care what type of site you link to, as long as the word Panda is featured a lot on it (and its not banned)

I hope your going to say google is to clever for this, and the competitor is wasting his time.

[Mike12345]

If the links are the sae color as the background then thats a case of hidden links in which case as a morally upstanding webmaster, you should send off a spam report to the SE's

As for the links, they are related in the sense that the word panda in it, so as far as i understand its the same as a blue widget site linking to a red widget site. IMO there not a lot wrong about that.

Linking to a related site is not the only factor, so i dont think you have a lot to worry about as long as your site is better than his. Plus he has hidden links, so it wont be long before he goes bye bye from the SERP's

The main issue is, is panda condoms useful to his users? If they're not then thats a bad thing for him.

[edited by: Mike12345 at 10:45 am (utc) on July 8, 2003]

[topr8]

I know google likes you linking to pages with a higher page rank in the same field as you

what makes you think that?

i don't think it makes any difference to your google rankings who you link out to.

although same color links are a dubious practice, i don't think they are contributing in any way to that page ranking well - of course if they own the other sites then those links may be contributing to THOSE pages ranking better.

[rogerd]

Topr8, there has been a consistent belief that a couple of links to on-topic, popular sites might help a page's rankings. I've never done the research to prove this, but the practice came well-recommended a couple of years ago.

There could be multiple factors at work, of course. Perhaps it's the "authority" issue, or maybe it's as simple as link text counting a bit more than plain text.

<added>Just noticed this thread that addresses the outbound linking issue in detail: [webmasterworld.com...] </added>

[topr8]

there has been a consistent belief that a couple of links to on-topic, popular sites might help a page's rankings. I've never done the research to prove this, but the practice came well-recommended a couple of years ago.

yeah i'm aware of the rumour that goes around about it boosing your rankings - actually i'd happily encourage it as i am the benificiary in that there are odd sites that link to me i'm sure because they are following the practice, so if thats anybody out there, thanks! and keep those links up!

but i don't think there is any truth in the idea at all, i even tried it a couple of years back and when i dropped the links noticed no difference at all.

as for the authority issue, then two or three outgoing links doesn't make you an authority even in the most obscure rare topics.

if link text counts more than plain text - then why not link to relevant pages on your own site.

btw i'm strongly in favour of outgoing links but not because they directly affect your rankings in the serps.

[dillonstars]

We noticed a significant jump in position (from about 7th to 1st on google) on one of our sites, and the only change we had made was that we added a link to another authority site on our target subject.

Now this could have been due to a change in algortithm too ...

[hotice_2002]

hi, hello everyone here.
I am glad to hear some suggestions on Links!

hi, Dillonstars
Sometimes I did nothing, but my site ranking on Google changed much. I think maybe Google just changed some algorithms or indexed some pages that links to yours.

I can not image how does google determine webpages are relatived. If I have a webpage written in Chinese, there are some links to English sites, must Google translate Chinese to English then determin whehter the content are relatived then determine whether add PR to that webpage? or reverse. The work is too difficult to do. Even the best translation software also can not translate some sentence properly.

Is this algorithm only affect the webpages in same language?

I don't know!

[dirkz]

Even the best translation software also can not translate some sentence properly.

Hi Hotice, there may be only one guy in this forum that could possibly know the details of their algo, and I'm definitely not the one :)

But for one thing, it's pretty much granted that google is not about sentences, but words, and words are not that complicated to translate, so it could already be possible that google cannot only detect related pages in the same language but also cross language.

Anyway, they are on the way for complete semantic analysis. Just search on google for the term and look at their job offers :)