Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
* Is it "legit" to use these sites, or is it a "paid link"?
* If one signs up for AdWords, would their site show up automatically in such sites? In other words, would AdWords improve my PR?
And any further info on how it works and how my competitor managed to do it, would be nice.
If I understand your question correctly, the answer is that Google "says" neither of these strategies are supposed to build PageRank. This doesn't mean that they don't work for some sites at the current moment - because they seem to sometimes.
1. Free submission directories - especially those that publish every submission - are something Google has intentionally tried to devalue.
2. Running Adwords on a site, through the regular Adsense program, should not be voting any PR through those links - because those links are generated via a script. However, certain premium Adsense publishers seem to get different handling. Their ads may be published via regular text and sthe ad text does get indexed. See [webmasterworld.com...] for a discussion.
3. Some sites run their own ads and style them to look like Adsense. These ads still do not seem to be in line with Google's guidelines, but the links do sometimes seems to work.
Bottom line, Google may currently let all kinds of strategies work for the moment - nd then at some point, they may create troubles for those sites if they are against the guidelines.
Google's guidelines explain their intention, but Google does not and cannot always enforce those guidelines in each and every situation. Sometimes they still need to develop the algorthmic tools to detect what's going on.
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One other thought on analyzing why your competition is ranking - 301 redirects can be transferring PageRank and link juice, and that kind of "hidden power" is not always easy to detect.
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One other thought on analyzing why your competition is ranking - 301 redirects can be transferring PageRank and link juice, and that kind of "hidden power" is not always easy to detect.
Possibly a new forum topic?
Now consider analyzing a competitor for a given query. What if their power on that particular phrase comes from anchor text? And what if the phrase mostly appears in backlink anchor text that points to a different domain - but that other domain then 301 redirects to the domain you are analyzing, the one that appears in the SERPs.
This can happens as web businesses buy up other domain names that were preciously active and built a backlink profile. The PR for the core domain can then appear unnaturally high. The core domain may rank extremely well for queries that you would only expect modest rankings for, looking at the on-page and off-page factors that you can easily inspect.
So how can your analysis see these 301'd domains? It's not always easy. Sometimes the redirecting domains are on the same IP address as the core domain, and then a reverse IP may show them. But sometimes the 301 redirecting domains are handled by a registrar - then they won't show up on a reverse IP.
You may be lucky and find various clues as you study the competition. Ther are some pricey premium services that will look for all domains owned by a certain party - but even then, it doesn't take a lot of foresight to register domains in a way that hides common ownership from easy discovery.
I've even seen some of these 301 backlinks show up in Google's link: operator. But you certainly cannot depend on that. In short, the influence of domain-level 301 redirects can be a relatively hidden factor that affects ranking in a way that is not easy to uncover.
