Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Once again these include some well known brand names, some of which do not provide what the keyword promises and one of them is a brand name which is only prominent in the niche because it blatantly uses a technique specifically outlawed in Google's quality guidelines in that it has an automated link exchange.
"This is in violation of Google's webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact your site's ranking in search results."
...but sometimes we will reward this behaviour and give you a related link.
Anyone else noticed recent changes to "Searches related to:"?
Cheers
Sid
With regard to your complaint about a Guidelines violation, Google never said that link exchanges are automatically a violation. The linking guidelines I see offer a lot of wiggle room, using words like "excessive" that have no exact definition. Google guidelines reference [google.com]
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The particular choices of query terms for those expansions do shift as Google's data changes. My take is that Google watches query revisions that are done by a user soon after their initial query. The technology described in the Query Revision patent [webmasterworld.com] seems to be in play in those selections.
One of the areas where I do watch "Searches related to" has been showing frequent changes. The query terms are particularly ambivalent, and even seasonal, so frequent changes make sense to me.
Don't you see the irony though. If one of Google's spam team looked at the site they would, I'm pretty confident, at least give it a penalty if not remove it from the index. However their algorithm, that chooses related to links, picks that very site to be one of 8 given a link.
The term that produces the related links only does it on .co.uk.
Cheers
Sid
