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I visited one of these pages and it's like a circus. A mix of spiritualists, evangelists, link exchange webmasters, and adult toy/video webmasters are all appraising a Jewish psychic website.
I can't believe that Google is indexing guestbooks. I don't know whether to snub this method of shameless promotion, or just join in!
Thanks for your reply. I read the thread, specifically the comment that:
when you sign guestbooks (no matter if you use your keywords in the link text) google will interpret it in this way that your site is about guestbooks ... my keywords NEVER appear in the top ten of the serp's ...
That's an interesting side-effect I never considered. However, my aforementioned competitor DOES have top 10 rankings, so he doesn't seem to be affected by this syndrome.
I suspect that Google doesn't realize the page is about guestbooks. In my example, so many spiritualists and adult webmasters have signed the guestbook -- filling the page with psychic and adult-related keywords -- that Google actually thinks the guestbook is about spirituality, adults toys and videos.
when you sign guestbooks (no matter if you use your keywords in the link text) google will interpret it in this way that your site is about guestbooks ... my keywords NEVER appear in the top ten of the serp's ...
Google will interpret that the other signers of those same guestbook pages are "similar" to your page.
Whether or not Google does something else with that information for general automatic algo ranking purposes, is another question.
One could speculate, that if the titles and headings of the pages linking to the similar pages contain text, similar to the titles and headings of the similar pages, that could give a ranking boost for that text (or something to that effect).
In other words, no bad harm could be done to your site by others.
IMO, the specific site in question at the quoted thread above did not rank tops for those keywords for other general algo reasons.
In a sense, this is partially about what guestbooks are about. For example, if I have a site of chocolate chip cookie recipes with a guestbook, is there any reason to think that spiritualists, evangelists and adult webmasters might not like cookies, find my site, and sign it? The people who thought up the idea of guestbooks never considered them a vehicle for providing links to related sites. Guestbooks are there for whoever happens to stop by.
As such, if Google finds guestbooks and indexes them, it isn't the people signing the guestbooks that are to blame, but Google for not figuring out how to algorithmically spot guestbooks and ignore them. Guestbook scripts have been around longer than Google has. I was on the Net surfing to sites with guestbooks back in 1997 when there was no Google. I'm surprised that Google at the beginning didn't figure out how to spot and ignore guestbooks.
Strongest points I've heard on this. The web was and is, in my opinion about linking. I'm tired of hearing people complain about irrelevant links and who is the best to link to. I have converted many sales for a product seemingly totally unrelated to the page that linked to it.
I have a software site and my mother sells homemade cookies. I bet many of the people interested in software also love mammas chocolate chip cookies. :)
If google decides to delve seriously into theming and weighing links differently (which I don't believe they have at all), it will take away one of the nicest aspects of the web- put a cool page up and people from all areas of interest tend to link to it and you can be rewarded.
Thanks. This whole idea about guestbooks having irrelevant links being a problem seems silly to me because guestbooks were never about that in the first place. Guestbooks mostly came about for vanity reasons. Mostly, they allowed webmasters to know people found their site and liked it. This is particularly relevant in the case of people with sites on free hosts, or their own ISP webspace. Those typically don't provide log access. For these webmasters, guestbooks are the only way they can know that people are actually finding their site. And, it gives users of your site a way to give useful feedback, such as suggesting additional related content, etc.
This whole idea about guestbooks having irrelevant links being a problem seems silly to me because guestbooks were never about that in the first place.
That's a good enough reason for Google to simply ignore them, IMHO. Ignoring guestbooks would help to maintain the quality of Google's results, and--just as important--it would help guestbooks fulfill their original purpose without being overwhelmed by spam. (Well, it wouldn't help the guestbooks that much, I guess, since a lot of Webmasters would go on assuming--rightly or wrongly--that guestbooks links were an easy way to build Google PageRank.)
Could well be. In September 2002 Google dropped a bomb on sites buying or optimizing for Pagerank. This forum's best guess seems to be that they put more weight on anchor text and reduced the value of Pagerank.
A link from a guest book carries little pagerank, because the guest book is normally buried in the site and also has so many outbound links, that the Pagerank is diluted to the point it's worthless.
So, pre-September guestbook links were pretty worthless.
Post September however, with the devaluation of Pagerank, and increase in the value of anchor text, a hundred links from different guest books with the right keywords may well be worth much more.
Most guestbooks I have seen don't let you select anchor text. If you are right, the trick would be to find those guestbooks that do allow this.
