Cutts at PubCon: "Only the links Google trusts count."

[potentialgeek]

Q. Everyone says I need more links. How do links improve the quality of the site? I don’t want to play this game and I don’t want to do this.

A: What matters is bottom line. Links are a part of search – they represent online reputation. Although there are many tools that report links, none of the tools can tell you which links are trusted by Google (not even Google’s tools). While the link structure looks bad from the outside, the actual linkgraph that Google uses/trusts looks much better. When the New York Times complained about a site with 10,000 spammy links, Google investigated the site and not a single link had slipped through Google’s filter. Only the links Google trusts count.

Does anyone know which kind of links Google trusts?

[aristotle]

Does anyone know which kind of links Google trusts?

According to the old theory of trustrank, a human committee selects a seed group of trustworthy authoritative sites. Then links from those sites spread the trust to other sites, which then spread it to others, and so on, with it gradually being diluted as it spreads.

[tcsoftware]

Does anyone know which kind of links Google trusts?

Generally large and popular sites where it would normally be impossible to get a followed link from without good reason. As aristotle said though you can still accumulate trust with links from non-authorative sites but the further they are away from the authority the less the link is worth.

[FranticFish]

... not a single link had slipped through Google’s filter

(wipes tea off computer screen)...

[rlange]

FranticFish wrote:
(wipes tea off computer screen)...

Keep in mind that he's not talking about the SERPs.

--
Ryan

[Andem]

When the New York Times complained about a site with 10,000 spammy links

Not that that is something to be proud about. When you can brag about catching the billions of spam links propping up some of the spammers at the top of the search results, then I'd be impressed.

[FranticFish]

Keep in mind that he's not talking about the SERPs

What is he talking about then?

[aristotle]

He's saying that many of the links that Googlebots discover are essentially disregarded by Google's ranking algorithm, because they are judged to be of little value as an ranking indicator.

[netmeg]

(Which is why you see PageRank drops that you can't always figure out)

[smithaa02]

Hopefully the mods won't mind, but here is a link to the expanded interview with Cutts/Amit:

[searchenginejournal.com...]

[brianp]

I'm sorry but his answer to this question is laughable. There are too many real world examples where brand new websites rank in the top three for competitive terms. The only thing these websites have that others below do not are massive backlink profiles from SENuke type sites.

Could give plenty of examples, but its usually hundreds of directories and community profiles were links to the sites are anchor text for the keyword in question. Completely un-natural backlinks, yet rank in top three for a keyword that returns tens of millions of results.

So unless Google highly trusts these "websites" that these hundreds of links are coming from, I would call this a carefully worded reply to a dangerous question.

[whatson]

Its what separates the pros from the amateurs. Knowing the right links that count.

[azn romeo 4u]

google will never be able to control spam. when it comes to money people will fine a way around everything.

[smithaa02]

So if only links that google trusts count...wonder how this affects the original pagerank formula.

Say a page has 500 juice points and 100 links. Only 50 are deemed trust worthy by google (they appear above the fold/outside of the boilerplate/have organic context/whatever...).

Before trust would factor in, each link would pass 5 juice points per link. If trust halves the total...then does do the remaining links pass 10 points each...or just 5 as that extra 50 page juice is passed into a black hole (kind of like no-follow)?

Don't know if google throws page juice away though...because Larry Page has indicated that page rank is merely the probability that a random walk (or link navigation) through the web results in somebody clicking your page...which to me sounds like they can't throw page rank away...so if untrustworthy links aren't getting this page juice, what is?

[whatson]

Look if you are doing it right then you are going for the right links anyway, related, useful web sites. Think of it as more will their visitors find your site useful and even pass some traffic your way. You should be able to tell what a quality site is.
Anyway, it wont hurt you either way, there are only a few link types that could potentially hurt you, and you can tell them very clearly.

[McMohan]

Only the links Google trusts count

Its all just hot gas. I had been watching a PR8 directory for some time, whose sole benefactor was a PR9 non-English site. Whats more, that link on PR9 site is invisible and the site itself looks spammy. On top of all these, I made a paid link report to Google through WMT some 3 months back, but even after the latest PR update, that site is not affected.

[arikgub]

Its what separates the pros from the amateurs. Knowing the right links that count.

Yes. As also taking MC's words with a grain of salt, and not overanalyzing them in endless debates :) We all know that only the links that Google trusts count. We also know that sometimes the ones Google trusts are the worst spammers.

[Hissingsid]

There was some talk years ago about Google disregarding links from certain areas of a page, the footer for example. I wonder if that has expanded to any in the page template, ie that are repeated on every/large numbers of pages in a site.

Google may not count no-follow links in the algo but it certainly uses the anchor text in links from certain highly trusted sites. Do your own tests.

[martinibuster]

Does anyone know which kind of links Google trusts?

I hope this FINALLY wakes up those who have difficulting making link decisions without first checking their toolbar or mozrank. ;)

I walked out of the last pubcon link building session of Thursday when one of the presenters listed mozrank as among the factors his tool uses to determine the worth of a link.

If you want to know what links count take a read in the link dev library [webmasterworld.com]. It's been said over and over again.

That said, I believe there's more going on than just links. Matt's just telling you a part of the story. There's more to it.

[shazam]

Sadly, the link spammers appear to be doing fine.

What google pr people say, and what the algo/manual adjustments actually do are two completely different things.

It's not hard to find sites ranking that have worthless/scraped content yet tons of spammy links. Just a few weeks ago I was trying to buy something and the #1 top site that google returned was a virus/spyware laden spamfest. I wanted to post the query here in another thread but the admin doesn't allow examples of terrible search results.

I realize it's an extremely hard job to sort out all the sites and return only the quality results. This is understandable, but the endless pr propaganda gets old.

If they want to "say" something, the best and most effective method would be to say it with the actual search results. Empirical evidence means a lot more than words, no matter how many times they repeat them.

[linkbuildr]

Whatever happened to the "major algo update" that would "drastically change the way we view links" Mr Cutts? Spam links are killing it still and I'm fine with that because my AM sites are making bank..can't beat em, join em.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Not to hijack the thread but mind your outgoing affiliate links. Nofollow or not google likely trusts the site you are linking to and you will boost it's pages ahead of your own.

[MikeNoLastName]

Links? Who GIVES LINKS these days at all (except us - if you're in our niche, and preferably a non-profit entity). We get a dozen requests a week to "exchange links" and every one of them offer to put you on a PR0 page, Not linked from ANYWHERE, linking to you via a script in exchange for a PR4 direct link. I know I'M afraid to link to most places these days, even though we used to years ago because it was helpful to our readers, simply for FEAR that they will become a "bad neighbor" next week, or next year and Google will hate us then. Google has literally totally DESTROYED linking (which was the really COOLEST thing about HTML from the day it was invented,) and it now shows in their results. Backlinks should be eliminated from the algo altogether. Who cares what the public thinks, If G wants an index, let G employees work endlessly to read and evaluate every site in it's index, like all the rest of us do with our sites.
Maybe Leo was right, there WILL be no search engines by next year :).

[martinibuster]

in exchange for a PR4 direct link.

The irony is that Google used to show backlinks that were PR 4+ then changed it so as not to influence linking patterns. That first iteration of the backlink SERPs introduced the (mistaken) notion that PR 4+ pages counted more.

Then someone mentioned that it was influencing linking behavior so google changed the backlink serps to show a random sampling across a range of pagerank values. But by then the damage was done and the PR 4 benchmark had taken hold in the minds of web workers. The why was forgotten. The benchmark stubbornly persisted without a logical reason. Which shows how unquestioning the industry is.

PR 4 is not a threshold of quality. It never was. Yet to this day PR 4 is the benchmark for links by thousands of so-called SEOs who do not even know why they regard PR 4 as a benchmark other than that's what everyone else is doing. Belief in PR 4 is the telltale symptom of someone who doesn't know SEO; it's the number one SEO Myth in the industry today.

[viggen]

Cutts at PubCon: "Only the links Google trusts count."

LOL,

sometimes its so hard to take MC serious, seriously...

[Dinkar]

... not a single link had slipped through Google’s filter

Correct. But he didn't told you the result.... almost all links PASS the filter... just kidding :-)

Does anyone know which kind of links Google trusts?

OK, I am telling you that secret... check your referral urls.

[canadafred]

I'm sticking to my observations that most artificial link building schemes are of little value when it comes to ranking web pages in the search engine results.

Top keyphrase contenders in competitive environments usually have either deployed exceptional on-site optimization or have effective off-site influences. Most often though, it's some combination of both.

About Grey Hat SEO - Even the most powerfully deceptive off-site manipulation trick (link building strategy) isn't necessarily the only search engine optimisation that'll show up at the top of valuable search results. There's tons of examples of ethical SEO atop the puffed-up piles of linked nonsense.

[bwnbwn]

MikeNoLastName I have to disagree with you. Links are valuable it is the way links are obtained that has changed.

[serj]

It is not '50' original sites that spread link juice to all the rest, did no one here see the leaked Google Guidelines? Google is continually using these people to manually review sites and as more of them are manually reviewed, more link juice becomes available to be shared by other sites... though this is a fine technique for blocking out some spam, I agree that SPAMers still find ways around this stuff, unfortunately Google inadvertently created this SPAM problem that has caused headaches for almost all webmasters trying to keep spam off of their sites.

[Reno]

When the New York Times complained about a site with 10,000 spammy links, Google investigated the site and not a single link had slipped through Google’s filter.

(Emphasis mine)

That's the kind of braggadocio that makes me question much of what he says.

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