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There's no sign of a penalty - toolbar shows PR7, it does OK in rankings, it shows 700+ backward links to the site.
Any suggestions?
Even though your backlink doesn't show with the "link:" command it still is counted by Google.
I highly doubt that they devalue high PR links. Why should they?
greg
It may be that you have been penalized. A Google penalty can take months to show up in the PR bar. One good indication is frequency of Googlebot visits. Have you seen a dramatic decrease in Googlebot activity?
As a precaution, make sure the 30 sites you are linking to (I assume they are yours) do NOT link back. The backlinks will not help much but this is how Google determines that the entire cluster should be penalized together.
- Chad
Google changed the way it displays backlinks. Higher PR ones usually don't show now. This is a widespread phenomenon so it is 99% likely that what you see has nothing to do with your site.
This is still the worst aspect of Google's change. It's mean-spirited to deliberately confuse less experienced people by consciously serving up useless trash.
Penalized - that's my obvious concern. GG comes crawling regular as ever and my site does OK (although it never fully recovered from Florida).
I'm a web designer (am I allowed to be that specific here?!) and the majority of the sites I build provide a discrete link at foot of page - not primarily for PR value, but to let people know who built the site. My clients are happy, I'm happy. The sites I link to, and who link back, are all completely different topics... so you've described exactly what I'm concerned about and that I've read about elsewhere: Google thinks I'm part of a big ol' link farm.
I'm not too interested in removing the sites from my portfolio or from removing the 'reciprocal' links just to keep the Google gods happy!
I guess there's no solution, so I'll just wait and watch to see what Google decides to do with my business (!).
steveb - I wouldn't call myself 'less experienced' ;) and I don't get lead astray by any one persons opinion. I'm aware of the mess that PageRank is in at the moment, but I haven't seen anyone describing my problem. As we all know, there's no certainty with G at the moment. For instance I have a PR7 site linking to me and that shows in my backlinks.
There are at least a dozen threads on the topic, probably forty mention it.
You may be doing something to get you penalized, but you would see the effects of that in ways that people get penalized, not some obscure thing that wouldn't hurt you at all (in other words, no penalty). On the other hand, thinking that you are not being effected by a widespread phenomenon effecting every site on the Internet is not a good road to go down.
Go to ten or twenty PR7 pages in the Google directory. See how many/most don't show as backlinks.
Go to ten or twenty PR7 pages in the Google directory. See how many/most don't show as backlinks.
Lots of them - in the web design category. Couldn't find any examples in other cats. That lends some credence to the 'link farm' possibility.
Many web design firms will have the same pattern as my site, which shares a similar pattern to link networks: lots of sites inter-linking (in this case only my site links to them all) and sharing the same IP or C-block, so I'm not going to casually dismiss the chance that the (not as clever as some like to think) Google bot won't add 2 + 2 and shoot me.
Out of the dozens of threads that I didn't find (and still couldn't with a variety of searches), was there any conclusion? Could you point me at one?
Yes the obvious one stated... the backlink command no longer shows anything useful or consistent, ignore it.
It cannot be overstated that at this time you will spare yourself a lot of grief if you simply avoid typing link:yoursite.com into Google. Just ignore it. It means nothing. It's a Google version of a sick joke, (but of course, we should feel grateful... we get the daily, feeble, Olympic graphics on the home page, and they have heaps of IPO dollars to roll around in, and they're still close to being a SE monopoly, so we should just shut up and be dazzled by their spammy, hyped-to-the-max piece-of-crap SE).
In my humble opinion, etc, etc.
Backlink data has been way off for a long time with Google, in my experiences that is.
I am staring to think/believe Google is devaluating most high PR backlinks since the high PR backlinks I got dont affect my SERPs at all.
I tend to agree with Nicke. For my reasons see my msg #38 in [webmasterworld.com...]
An 'unnatural' SEO'd site will probably have proportionally far fewer links from low PR pages because the webmaster has been concentrating on getting the high PR links.
Thats a bit tough for Google to use that sort of thought pattern.
What happens if the site naturally attracts high PR links, authority sites that have high PR and link out?
I am still seeing a lot of good coming out of the high PR links that I have, coupled with the right anchor text and the right on page optimisation.
I remain of the opinion that this behaviour is accidental (i.e. it's a bug) but I could be wrong. In any case, forcing webmasters to use Yahoo to check backlinks is not good public relations.
Kaled.
It's not like this is there just for web masters.
It's part of the public facing services of a billion dollar company installed on millions of PCs. I'm not at all sure what the game plan is here, if it's not accurate then why show it, if it's supposed to bring up the results it does I don't get it.
So in short either it's broken (which I kind of suspect since the PR is slowly going out of date) in which case that's a bit shoddy.
OR it's supposed to look that way. If so why?
So in short either it's broken (which I kind of suspect since the PR is slowly going out of date) in which case that's a bit shoddy.
I am not sure why you would think it is broken or that PR is going out of date. PR is still a core part of the Google algo so it will always be a factor.
It's not like this is there just for web masters.
Who else would be interested if it was not just webmasters and optimisers? The everyday searcher does not care how many backlinks a site has.
What happens if the site naturally attracts high PR links, authority sites that have high PR and link out?
I would expect it also to naturally attract low PR links, thereby producing a natural mix.
I would expect it also to naturally attract low PR links, thereby producing a natural mix.
I would expect that as well, but in reality who knows what could happen.
you are not being penalized. Relax.
Oooh, that's OK then... conclusive evidence.
Has Googlebot stopped taking pages?
Huh?
...Google produces the same random sample each time
Random but constant at the same time. The mathemeticians are herniating.
...Google has purposely screwed up their links command
Where to begin? What could possibly be the point? What is the percentage of vaguely-aware-of-Google-algorithm-changes people out of the Google user base? 0.01%? 0.0001? Who knows? I know for sure it ain't enough to affect any commercial decision.
Yup, the toolbar is fubared, as far as PR / backlinks is concerned but, if you like to believe in a conspiracy, that is **great** for Google - any business who can't consistently hit the top 20 (which used to be easy for a compentent SEO) now needs to look at Adwords.
Kerching. "Would sir like the Ferrari in red or black?"
Random but constant at the same time. The mathemeticians are herniating.
Programmers often use random numbers to seed various algos such as encryption. However, they are not truly random, they are referred to as pseudo-random numbers. The only way to create truly random numbers is to create a hardware random generator based on, say, radioactive decay. Of course, one or two members of WW are probably aware that a hot cup of tea can work wonders too.
Kaled.
I am not sure why you would think it is broken or that PR is going out of date.
