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I went over to alltheweb.com and found that he actually had 18,000 backlinks. Immediatly I saw that many of them were guestbooks, so I did this search:
"link:site.com -guestbook" and now I only got 216 results. This means he has backlinks nearly exclusively in guestbooks - and it works.
This surprises me, because everyone here is always talking about how important it is to avoid links in guestbooks. Is this still true? And could there be some other reason for his high SERP?
"If you want major traffic and are not at all bothered dumping your URL on millions of other WWW locations that may or may not welcome your advertisement, then this is the package for you! However, if you feel that this is spam, immoral, or uncalled for in anyway, DON'T purchase the package."
They even use as a sales pitch better search engine rankings! However, I have to figure Google is not letting most guestbooks pass on PR. I'd have thought 18,000 guestbooks would do better than a PR6.
Anne
But, in this matter how close are you at the moment to being ideal on this matter? ;) I'd have to figure that in the vast majority of cases, Google should be able to spot guestbooks and ignore links on them. Even I could write the code that would spot the vast majority of guestbooks, because they typically use standard scripts.
So you can find some automated way to skip such a guestbooks ...
Just a thought :)
Due to spammers and e-tards, 'Company name' has removed its guestbook from this site. If you want to communicate with us, need a brochure or have questions about our services, simply EMAIL 'company name' so we can process your request as quickly as possible. If you are looking for testimonials and email links to former clients, click on 'New Guestbook url'
Ted
However, I have to figure Google is not letting most guestbooks pass on PR. I'd have thought 18,000 guestbooks would do better than a PR6.
rfgdxm1:
you may be right about this but not necessarily! the reason why this site gets only pr6 could also be that the signed guestbooks have extremly many entries so that the passed pr is extremly weak. plus from my understanding of pagerank it is not exluded that a few high-pr inboundlinks can create a much higher pr than thousands of almost zero pr inbounds.
Can someone not get Webmasterworld.com banned in search engines by using that $99 service and posting 1,000,000 guestbook entries 'favoring' WebmasterWorld? (hackers!) ...same for a tormented competitor site?
All other entries over a predefined age i.e. a day/week etc, are pushed into store and onto a page with a much lower PR.
This would explain why when I've checked competitor's backlinks I find no live entry linking to their site, only the one in the cached page.
It could also explain why 18,000 links (or even a couple of hundred) makes little difference to a current PR on a linked site i.e. they were only 'valuable' when they were first indexed.
The trick, if any were needed, would seem to rely on submiting your guestbook entry a week or so before a deep crawl is scheduled.
Similarly, sites that don't archive their guestbooks, simply continue to dilute the attributable value of their PR. So what worked well in week 1, would have no way near as much impact in week 30 regardless of the PR.
My conclusion... don't waste your chasing a moving target and instead spend your time improving your own site and securing permanent links to it.
Is'nt it rather unfair to penalize a site for one gazillion guestbook entries especially since such postings are not neccessarily in control of a site owner
I don't think GoogleGuy ever said that they would penalize sites that ened up in guestbooks. All they will do is prevent guestbooks from passing PR. People can still use them and people can still sign them. There will just not be any PR benefit.
