Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I'll give you a scenario: Let's say BMW decides to open a new site tomorrow and call it "bmwwidgets.com" which will offer a free car to first 1000 visitors. Obviously this is very interesting and thousands of other sites mention it and link to it - BMW will get penaltized? I don't think google will penaltize you for simply being very popular. Is anyone else with me on this?
Last September, while suffering a lengthy google ban, I got a short spell of re-entry. I was fine for about 10 days, but as soon as the links were calculated I was banned again. It was my only fault, my site was clean as a whistle. As soon as I got my ban in June, I took the opportunity to delete old pages, get rid of any dup content, built more personal content.
I have never had to set up reciprocal links, as I was distributing a huge number of free web templates with a "template by" link on them. You can imagine, over 5 years approx 22,000 individuals had made use of my free templates and each had a one way, front page link on it.
I'm a firm believer that the flood of "New" links, after a ban is cleared, was the reason for my second period in the wilderness. Finally I got forgiven on December 27th, but I notice the backlinks haven't been calculated since then ... oh oh!
All the best
Col :-)
In other words, when it comes to link growth, one link is not the same as another - and it's more than PR.
Sure, if you add 20,000 recip links to your site, expect to pay, as many will be crap, and you will cop fall out from their crapness. Also, you will leak pr like a siv.
BUt get 1000 top sites to somehow link to your site in one month?
Its all good.
To his point, we could probably guess link growth is relational to visits in some way, so the first example of BMW offering free cars would have an acceptable visit growth to link growth ratio; Conversely, if ROS links in the same number were added to another site, the visit growth related to link growth would show the site was not more popular, but just adding links.
Justin
I'm not so worried any more as I've sold the company, but it does lead to the drinking of many bottles of wine in celebration and then an untimely depression when the site gets banned again.
Beware anyone who makes it back in ... don't celebrate too soon, your head will thank me ;-)
All the best
Col :-)
I'll give you a scenario: Let's say BMW decides to open a new site tomorrow and call it "bmwwidgets.com" which will offer a free car to first 1000 visitors.
In this scenario the huge number of links would not be a problem as there would also be a large number of searches, proving it to be genuinely popular and a site people were looking for.
I believe Google made this change to their algo in response to the problems of finding new sites related to natural disasters.
If you launch a new site that receives little search traffic but lots of links then that flags up as unnatural and off you go to the sandbox
I was distributing a huge number of free web templates with a "template by" link on them.
Phpbb Group does the same and they got PR9, no penalties at all. So where's the difference?
No penalty, just not always a reward.
It cannot be plain penalty. It would be too easy to kick out the competitor just spamming blogs with thousands of links to their site! Googlers are too wise to allow for such thing.
But many links from similiar sites may count not much better than one link, so SERPs effect can be insignificant. And Google has its own ways to determine what to call 'similiar sites'.
link growth is relational to visits in some way
Normally, Google knows nothing about number of visits on a site! Unless the site has Adsense on it...
With Adsense on page, Google can actually check each one of your backlinks wheter it's being clicked by humans (natural link) or not (spammy link, hidden link). And people don't often click on legitimate footer links like 'template by' or 'webdesign by', so they might be unjustly treated as black hat links.
But checking if a backlink is clicked by people is possibly only on pages with Adsense, which tracks down all visits on page including the referer.
If Google algos were as clever as some people seem to think, Google would have no need whatsoever to have any sort of threshold/penalty system.
I for one just don't buy into the theory that all Google engineers have brains the size of planets - let's not forget page-hijacking, for instance.
Kaled.
Google knows nothing about number of visits on a site
But they do know a lot about how many times your company name (or widget) was searched for. They also know how many times in was searched for last month/year. If these search numbers show no growth but the number of links to your site grows by 50% then a flag could be raised.
Conversely, a quick increase is the number of inbounds could be forgiven by google if there is evidence to suggest your niche/site/widget was generally experiencing a surge in popularity.
This is just a theory of course but it's the way I would attempt to implement such a filter.
arran.
Heck, I'll even proclaim that the sandbox exists when I'm speaking to other webmasters!
Sometimes you need learn NOT to ask the question .....
Google knows nothing about number of visits on a site
Then what's that disclaimer when I install the toolbar for?
The sample size might not be as large as they would like it to be, but I would bet they know a lot more about visits than we think they do... they also have access to every search you and I have ever made --- put a couple of things together and you have some powerful visit information.
Justin
That many high quality links just doesn't look natural. Anything that doesn't look natural is dampened by Google.
Unless you've been banned, as in out of the index, I doubt they will do anything.
Unless you've been banned, as in out of the index, I doubt they will do anything.
They will if you generate large sums in Adsense revenue off that site ....
