Forum Moderators: open
I have read here that this is not recommened for obtaining higher rankings, well it worked for him, why not me?
For those who say its a matter of time before google will drop him....how long? does anyone have an example where this was done before? He has been at the top for 4 months now.
Someone give me a reason not to sign those guestbooks!
I could easily make a script that would submit to lets say 1,000 guestbooks and FFA's in a few hours, do that for about 20 sites, thats maybe 3 days work and I'll be the number 1 website in my field because all my competitors have PR0 - sounds sweet n' easy to me!
All this and my site goes unaffected!
Doesn't sound right does it?!
Thing that strikes me as interesting is that I could get my competitiors banned by going around and signing 1000's of guestbooks.
No you can't! GoogleGuy has specifically stated that guestbook signatures WILL NOT GET YOU BANNED!
It will only be considered in those cases where there is a human review, and there has to be some sort of ON SITE problems. If there are on site problems at your competitor's site, why not just fill out a spam report on him. If there aren't any, then signing those guest books might even help him out.
So signing GB for your competitor wouldn't get them banned in my opinion.....just a waste of time as they are most likely ignored. Smart Google :)
In fact, they probably have a few of the better guestbook links in there if they are all the way up to a PR4 with only 1000 guestbook links.
Google doesn't have to block PR from most guestbooks. With some of the guestbooks that I have seen, you would be better off adding a random page to your own site to give yourself that very minor boost that one page gives you.
They just have to worry about the very few guestbook pages that are actually worth something AND are being abused. Google might be doing something about the guestbooks, but in most cases people are wasting their time, even if google counts them.
Why would a site with 1000 backlinks get a pr4 and a site with 18 links get a pr5 with the EXACT SAME CONTENT?
First off, the number of incoming links has little to do with PR. It is the quality of those links.
And if the PR4 page is not showing up and it has the exact same content as the PR5 page, it is probably tripping the duplicate content filter, and google is just showing the higher ranked site.
I hadn't even thought of it that way, leave it up as a honeypot. Then just keep an eye on the sites that depend on it and never let them get good ranking for long.
Most of the people that try it will not understand that they just aren't going to get much past PR4 using this technique. It seems those that try it are the same ones that claim they are not good at math. If signing 1000 guestbooks will get you PR4, it will take (assuming a log base of 8) 8000 guestbooks for PR5 and 64000 for PR6. But the farther down whatever list of guestbooks you go, the lower their PR is likely to be. Pretty soon you are signing PR0.3 guestbooks. So now we are probably talking a quarter million guestbooks for a PR6.
And after all that work, you are suddenly on googles radar as a site that needs to be taken down. If they don't find anything penalty worthy on your site, they can just grey bar the 5 highest GBs pointing to you, and suddenly you are hurting again.
I like it, let them spend their time continually spamming the guestbooks, but never let them get anywhere with it.
Guys, I'm sorry to burst your bubble here but there are quite a few guestbook pages with a PR of 4 or even 5 and maybe 15 links on them. You have to look for them that's all...
Actually, I don't.
I don't even do reciprocal links. Why should I bother with guestbooks? If I sign a guestbook with my personal homepage URL, it will be because I like the site, I won't even open IE to see what the PR is. So far i have signed 3, and they are all my friends sites.
I will never spam a guestbook, just like I will never send spam e-mail or spam google. It's more fun doing things right, and still beating the spammers.
Remember, google does keep track of your guestbook links. They do not penalize for them, but they do keep track. Why call the extra attention to yourself?
For most competitive keywords, you need links, lots of them!
What PR10 site that you know of does reciprocal linking? I can't think of any.
I link to who I want to, and other sites link to mine for the same reason.
I do care about my ranking in google. but getting links is not a problem for me. And if I were to participate in something like a Reciprocal Linking, my site would lose some credibility.
It will be interesting to see how this affects the rankings once the update has settled
Now I know that SEO sites probably get greater scrutiny than in other areas - but it does appear that sites that sign guestbooks and have few links that are 'on theme' tend to get punished. Those that have guestbook entries (maybe put their by competitors) but have a lot of 'on theme' links from peer sites do not. So bottomline seeems to be, do it to inflate PR without getting sites on the same theme to link to you and you'll be zapped. If your site already has worthwhile incoming links which are seen by any reviewer to have value - then guestbooks will not harm you. But I still wouldn't use them as part of an SEM policy. All IMHO of course.
As long as you got links and no matter what site it is, google don't really care. google don't really care if you link from a fish site to a furnitue site.
Yes, Google won't penalize site which sign lots of GB because competitors could do that to kill a site. BUT! I Believe Google already know their weakness of link popularity algo when come to guestbook/message boards/forums. It is there, they are working on how to solve it but it isn't solved yet.
>> They haven't solve the problem with GB.
Even if they have reduce weight on GB, maybe a division by 10. Then signing 10 GB will be equal to have 1 normal link and signing 10,000 will be equal to 1,000 normal links!
He's not even a real competitor because he just uses my theme to bring people to his insurrance sites. He built a small private looking site with free content (far from unique, available everywhere), submitted it to DMOZ and Yahoo - and now signs tons and tons of guestbooks.
My site is 2 years old, very unique, couple k pages, good links and falling behind his garbage site. That sucks! I don't complain, but i'm really frustrated ... :(
However, the update is still running and there's still some hope, there's still this cute url [google.com] and i (still) trust in google. ;)
If he didn't add any links, and he was a low 6, even those 50 GBs PR might not be enough to keep him at 6. Or hi might have lost a link or two.
No need to punish such a site directly. All Google would have to do is drop all the guestbook links for the site so they don't count, regardless of who put them there. If the guestbooks are all the links a site has, this would cause it to be buried so far down in the SERPs nobody would find it. The site would then be fairly ranked.
I have a problem is that I bought the perfect domain name and put great content on the site. Then I worry how to get listed at google because my site is good enough for first page results but there is no way to get in.
There is no editor for my category at dmoz.
I decide to enter the url in the guestbooks and some forums. Then I start to worry and I do a search and find this thread and some others about it. Now I am really worried!
I did this just in january
Now my site will never get into dmoz because the editor will see all the guestbook links :( I don't even know how many there are, maybe 20 to 40 total, I will have to wait and see what the result is.
I need to take a long term view of my site. There are no easy shortcuts in this.
Thanks for the forum I wish I had found this a long time ago.
