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You mention that you found one of your competitors with high PR. And? Do they also hold respectable positions for their targeted keyword phrases?
As the rest of your message seemed to be directed to me, I assume this was too. The problem was that I never mentioned any such thing.
First off, I have no competitors. There are no sites that do what my site does. There are some sites with something similar, and many of them are even associated with my site.
As for other sites in the SERPs competing for postion, I just don't care that much. I wouldn't mind knocking epinions down in the SERPs, but that's just because they are a basically useless site.
If you are referring to what I said about the SEO company, it was one I found when I checked out the nick of one of the whiney members on this forum a couple of months ago. The funny thing was that they were litterally bragging about the equivalent of getting #3 on a search for "donut podunk iowa" when there was only one donut shop in town. All they really did was give the donut shop its one and only incoming link so that it would make it into the index.
I'm not jealous of their PR or their ranking.
While I agree that low PR pages can beat out higher PR pages, it takes an incredible amount of optimization to beat out a PR3 if your page is <PR1.
I in fact have several PR2 pages that beat out pages with PR4-PR5 on manufacturers websites for some of their own products on searches for "manufacturer product" where no SEO at all was done to the on-page content.
As for whether or not making a link farm out of your clients sites is spam or not, it doesn't matter what I think. It's what google thinks is spam and what they decide is a priority to go after that matters.
In this case, as you noted, it is risky behavior. Not only do they risk their own site, they are risking their client's sites.
If you have those 2 things you will always win with higher PR.
I may have to disagree with that statement. I'll reiterate that there are many lower PR sites that outrank higher PR sites in many industries. Please, don't let that little green bar fool you. You've mentioned three of the factors that are considered when determining page relevancy; PR, Title and Description. There are lots and lots of other things after that.
I can even find low PR pages that don't have the keyword phrase in their title but it is used strategically throughout the rest of the page (the other things).
I think it has been clarified that the type of pages you are referring to are questionable. If you've reported them as stated and nothing has been done, then they may not have passed the poor quality test by the reviewer, hence no action.
The term web maps has been discussed here quite a bit. Google can easily see rings of links, link farms, web rings, whatever you want to call them. It does not matter what the design of the page looks like, its the actual textual link content.
Google says, let's run a filter that flags all pages that interlink to one another and form a ring. Let's establish some minimum number before the filter even registers an issue. Now, ignore the value of those links that were found in these particular types of rings, farms, etc.
The tactic is definitely questionable. Does it work? I don't know. Because what you are seeing is just that, face value. Too many other factors involved here to really determine whether or not those pages are having the effect they were intended to have.
So, the page has a PR6. What do other pages in the same industry have? What's the highest PR? If it is PR8, then that PR6 is somewhat weak. I believe strongly that certain industries have a PR Cap, meaning that once you reach say PR7, there is no going further. Try to find more than a handful of SEM sites that have PR8. Six months ago, yes. Now, probably not more than a handful. I believe our industry (SEM) has a PR Cap.
I look at PR like the Richter Scale. Each tenth of a point adds that much more power to the PageRank factor. A 6.1 right now is pretty powerful if the industry PR Cap is at 7. ;)
As the rest of your message seemed to be directed to me, I assume this was too. The problem was that I never mentioned any such thing.
BigDave, no reference to you at all. I was referring to the original post of this topic from ogletree.
It is definitely bad business from a professional standpoint. But, as we've all seen, everything and anything goes, or I should say, has gone up to this point. As technology improves, all those old school tricks become obsolete. Some don't care as they are looking for immediate gratification and not concerned about the long term implications.
"If your competitor is ranked higher than you send in a spam report. If that doesn't work, then blame Google."
Hey whiners, blame yourself.
After reading hundreds of posts here it is pretty clear that there is no way to link to other web sites for fear that someone will yell "SPAM!" and go running to Google to report it.
So what is the right way to link to other sites? You certainly can't link to more than a few sites before ogletree reports you.
Why don't we take the "web" idea out of the Internet and remove all links - because then it will be fair to all you lazy whiners who simply got out-worked by a competitor.
Once again Google should not and probably won't even look at it as spamming as long as it provides content. It is only spamming if the pages have no value. Make sure all the pages have some value. Google is a better place because of SEO. Without us Google would be almost worthless. As long as SEO gets sites that are relevant to the top of searches Google should not be penalizing them.
Good for 2 reasons.
1. Helps them get spidered if they havnt been already.
2. Gives them a link.
I don't see anything wrong with that and there is no malicious intent as I dont add a link to my site from theres.
Say you have a group of 10 sites, and each page on each site links to the homepage on every other site; i.e., the footer of each site's page has a link's bar which links to the 10 homepages. This is obviously a web-ring... should, in your opinions, this be a penalty, even if the links themselves are instructive?
Ultimately, it doesn't matter whether something is right or wrong, useful or useless, etc. - it's whether a particular situation is risky or not. IMO, the kind of linkage pattern you describe is risky, particularly if the sites don't have a lot of other linkage.
Any site doing better than my clients is CLEARLY spam. Where as all our success is purely down to our genius!
