Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Google usually reacts to linking schemes--eventually--and when it does, it can hit hard.
What link development schemes did you previously anticipate would be targeted for bans or penalties, and what are your predictions for the months and years ahead?
Include what won't be tolerated and what accepted methods will get more value.
p/g
I mentioned this in another thread... For the last year, I have decided not to chase links but spend ALL of my time writing, occasionally (very occasionally) writing for a one way link to an article I think is perfect for the linkee (sp?).
Reason being, I have decided that I want my links to appear totally natural and to make my site totally reliant on it's attraction to visitors.
The results of my strategy have been this.........
I have watched my competitors grow at a rapid rate while I trawl along the bottom. Their forum profile spamming has left me clattering behind and the only thing keeping my website afloat is the quality of my forum members.
Now... when my limited traffic took a dive last week, I went into a sulk for a while but it recovered the next day. I went on a binge of forum profile spamming for a few hours while in that sulk but I have now decided to continue with the strategy of not chasing links.
I am convinced I will be on top one day because of this.
They'd be much smarter to continue to evolve other algo factors - semantic analysis, natural pattern measurements, historical records for domains, etc, etc, than to try to get more tricks out of what is essentially a one trick pony.
So I don't anticipate too many direct moves in the future against various types of linking, but rather an evolution to other kinds of analysis that are not so vulnerable to webmaster gaming. Their goal would be that the onlyway to imitate quality and relevance is actually to create real quality and relevance. Of course, we're not there yet ;)
I am convinced I will be on top one day because of this.
Expecting people to link to you is about as productive as putting a shop in the middle of nowhere and expecting your customers to find you.
You have to be proactive about your links or, frankly, they'll never come. As in all areas of life, you have to do the work to get the results. If you sit around, expecting links to come, you'll be in the poor house pretty quickly.
Writing content is great (I post up several new pieces to my recently google-blasted site every day) but without promoting your pieces somehow, you are just talking to a wall.
It seems to me that mini-sites are the wave of the future anyways. In my niche, I constantly see some dufus mini-sites (who are obviously promoting a parent site) all over google. It's so blatant its obnoxious.
It completely destroys the "overoptimized backlink" argument. Another competitor of mine (different site of mine, different niche) destroys this concept as well.
if you visit a page (maybe from another search engine, it doesn't even have to be from google) and spend ten minutes looking at it, and then click around the site, and revisit the site the next day, and then bookmark it, and visit it a load more times after that, then google will know you value it. it doesn't matter whether you give it a backlink or not.
if you think about it... what percentage of the population actually owns a website anyway? it's tiny.
99.9% of the population have no way of telling google that they value a site, because they don't have a website of their own to put a backlink on.
it's much better for google to measure user behaviour. that will tell them loads more than backlinks ever will.
and also... if they measure user behaviour then it will be impossible to cheat. because you don't have any access to the information that the user sends to google.
Hey, I wanna be first to exploit this. :P
Seriously, I do think that bookmarking is probably Google's next intent. Seeing what people bookmark and don't bookmark is probably a good indicator of what people like and don't like.
I'm sure they're already out there.. not to mention the fact that you can write a script for your computer that will copy what ever paths you take and in exactly the same way. All you need is some way to reset the ip of the machine, but I'm sure someone has already figured that one out.
I think in the future that Google will ding sites that have ALL of their out-going links with those darn rel=nofollow. I think that they may already be doing this.
I think that google will in the future have a way for you to "register" your content. We basically already do this through webmaster tools. Google of course will have to immediately spider the page you submit and "flag" it as YOUR content. That will keep the scrapers at bay.
think that google will in the future have a way for you to "register" your content. We basically already do this through webmaster tools. Google of course will have to immediately spider the page you submit and "flag" it as YOUR content. That will keep the scrapers at bay.
I wish there was a way, in google, to disavow an incoming link.
I was just thinking of this exact same thing the other day.
Like a nofollow in reverse...
I was wondering if there was a way in htaccess you could "bounce" all attempted incoming traffic from a specified URL. Maybe you can force a return to last page?
If Google were to give us a URL blocking option, it sure would knock out a lot of spam sites. The engineering shouldn't be too difficult either by a snippet of code to add to a site or from the Webmaster Tools. I'd prefer it in Tools to save time.
p/g
I am convinced I will be on top one day because of this.Good luck.
Expecting people to link to you is about as productive as putting a shop in the middle of nowhere and expecting your customers to find you.
After a year of solid link building I did the same thing...
It's been working just fine.
I think you are both correct:
I would say the theory works as long as you establish a base of solid links and traffic prior to allowing the site to 'attract it's own links', but would probably not work if you put a site up and expect people to find / link to it without an established base.
Justin
