Google Algo is Smart in Filtering Inbound Links

[jamesyap]

I am quite sure that google now ignore/reduce PR vote from guestbook links. Since I saw a site who sign 1000+ guestbooks has a PR of only 5.

SMART.

Another thing I notice. For sites who uses some auto/semi-auto (not machine gun) link exchange tools, such as linksmanager and zeus doesn't have a PR they deserve.

I seen site with 3000+ inbound links with only PR6.

Google are not blind. Only deserve links get more weight while links from guestbooks, message boards, mailing list, forum, groups, and now links page will lost weight or even ignore!

I do really really think link page has less weight. I bet those pages with filename links.html or link-exchange.html will be cursed.

Just imagine you are google researcher and you want to return more quality results, would you put much weight on outbound links from link page/link exchange program?!

[BigDave]

Google would have to be totally incompetent to be banning sites for guestbook links

And they ain't incompetent!

I am truely amazed that people think that some Great Idea, that they came up with in 5 minutes, hasn't already been thought of by the engineers at Google who spend their entire days thinking about this stuff.

I really don't think google wants to block PR from all guestbook entries. I'm sure that they would prefer that guestbooks were all used for their original purpose. But I have no doubt that they will take whatever steps are necessary to keep such abuse from having a major impact on the results.

They will be able to deal with this without enabling competitors to get your site banned.

[rfgdxm1]

Actually, when you think about what guestbooks are intended for, the guestbook page itself should be indexed and able to be found on a search, but links on it should not be able to pass on PR. IOW, if I am looking for the Widgetworld guestbook, I should be able to find it. However, if I sign it that link should be ignored, because the page isn't actually voting for me. The fact someone here was able to quickly noodle together a guestbook signing script shows what a folly it would be to ban sites based on guestbook entries. Competitors could get the competition banned while they sleep and the computer does all the dirty work.

[BigDave]

I'm going to disagree with you there rfg, at least the part about it not counting when it is used in the traditional, pre spam, way. But given that it IS being used for spam, I agree that it would be acceptable to remove guestbook links from the equation.

There is nothing wrong with honestly "voting" for yourself. The owner of the website, and the votes of the guestbook page, willingly allows guestbook entries to contain outgoing URLs and is therfore allowing people to use his votes. There are also many other ways to legitimately vote for yourself.

My Yahoo groups profile which has a real PR of 4, allows me to vote for my homepage and 3 "cool sites". Yahoo allows me to put those links on their site. Yeah, it does not really count for much considering how many other links yahoo puts on that page, but it is still more than your average guestbook. Should we block profiles too? How about .sig lines that contain URLs in the various archives of listservs out there?

I prefer to think that Google will try to deal with the problem while causing as little collateral damage as possible. And lets face it, anyone that thinks that going the guestbook route is the way to fame and fortune is likely to get themselves in trouble other ways, and isn't that much of a threat anyway.

[coconutz]

>>My Yahoo groups profile which has a real PR of 4, allows me to vote for my homepage and 3 "cool sites".

Hi BigDave, Have you seen Yahoo profile links show up as backlinks? I had always thought that these did not/would not from looking at [groups.yahoo.com...]

User-agent: *
Disallow:

[edit]added- my mistake, I misread tag, I just never seen these show up[/edit]

[BigDave]

Yes, they do.

The vast majority of them sre actually guessed PR, but if you participate, and are very active in any yahoo groups with public archives, then you can get a half way decent PR. The highest real PR that I have seen for a profile is PR6.

If you look at the message archives, there are links next to the messages to the profile of the person who sent it.

It is not the sort of thing that would work very well for a spammer. Those of us with PR3+ have thousands of messages in the archives.

Go to the site in my profile and do a link: on it. I think that there are at least 4 showing up this month.

Of the 1200 members of our group, I would guess that there are no more than a couple of dozen that have real PR on their profiles. But I expect that it will be rising with google planning to expand to 10G pages this year.

It's one of those things that you use if you have it.

That robots.text allows crawling everything.

[coconutz]

>>Go to the site in my profile and do a link: on it.

Thanks, I can't recall seeing Yahoo Groups profile links show up.

>>That robots.text allows crawling everything.

Realized that after I posted ;)

[BigDave]

We have the advantage of having started out as a yahoo group before moving to our own site. We still use it for our listserv.

If you don't do something similar, I doubt that you would ever see a profile as a backlink. And it is not worth the work to do it just for the PR.

[FillDeCube]

>>Hey sell your script for $50 and I think you can make millions since most spammers will be interested!

Haha.. I won't sell it becaused it will eventually kills all GB in a matter of few days or even hours.. If GB works I will keep it for myself..

[EquityMind]

Just ran an interesting check on a site that I know is doing GB links. This is a site that has three mirrors of the same site. One of the mirrors has over 1,000 GB links and pretty much nothing else. The other two have less than 20 backlinks each but have Yahoo backlinks. The 1,000 GB link mirror is a PR4 while the other two are PR5. Doing a ranking check on one of their primary keyphrases puts the two mirrors with a PR5 at number 1 and 2 for the keyphrase while the PR4 (GB site) didn't show up for the first 20 pages of results...

[rfgdxm1]

In that case EquityMind, looks like Google is doing what I expected they would do: give no benefit for guestbook links. Even I could noodle together a program that could spot most guestbooks to ignore them, and the Google programmers are a lot better than I am. The correct way to handle such is just to ignore guestbooks rather than penalties, because of the potential of competitors signing guestbooks.

[EquityMind]

Exactly ...... beside what GG has alluded to in the past that there is nothing a competitor could do to hurt you in the serps....

[FillDeCube]

As I mentioned earlier, here is the result..
My new site has a new PR of 4. It has about 200 backlinks from GBs.

[BigDave]

FillDeCube,

Does it bother you at all that you are abusing a feature on other people's sites that they put there to be friendly?

And a PR4 really just isn't all that much. I probably get enough PR from having my URL in my WW profile to get a PR4.

<added>But you won't want to do that now, because Googleguy could then go check out your spammy site</added>

[FillDeCube]

BigDave, strongly agree with you. It is not good to spam. At least my test shows that signing 1000+ GB will have PR4 only and I understand that it won't last long...