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This competitior is also Google-bombing the money keyword in Guestbooks--zillions of them, and he just displaced me from #1 by this technique, where I had been sitting unmoveable like KingKong for many months.
I'm generally clean, white hat (maybe slightly grey) but this guy's a jerk and he goes unpunished.
Anyway-
long preamble to this simple question:
Anybody know how I can search Google for all the backlinks but exclude backlinks from this one news site?
I tried link:www.example.com -www.newssite.com including variations on spaces, no spaces, [,...] no [,...] and AND NOT operators. Is this a lost cause? If not, what's the technique?
Thanks
I'm generally clean, white hat (maybe slightly grey) but this guy's a jerk and he goes unpunished.
seems rather clever to me ...
Shak
I agree, but is has been this way for a very long time.
You can't really blame people for taking advantage of this Google short coming. They want to win, and Google is giving them an easy method!
Google needs to shift focus from being page based to being site based. A site being a unique domain, not a sub-directory.
The free hosting (e.g. GeoCities) type folks will be up in arms when this eventually happens, but Google need to learn to live with that as they move more towards being a commercial organization.
A vote from others is good, but being allowed to vote for yourself thousands of times isn't if it carries the same weight!
Imagine the improvements in relevancy Google-wide if this glitch were closed. And from a webmaster's point of view it sucks too, because buying these links is like an arms-race...to win, you have to pay for links. In effect, top in SERPS simply equates to who can buy the most backlinks via this new twist on a linkFarm. Therefore follow this through and what you have, effectively, is Google as a pay-for-placement engine -except that Google doesn't even get see of the money!
Remember, we're not talking about 'advertising' here, where you pay for one ad, counted as coming from only one site.
This is thousands of links coming from only one site, exploiting a flaw whereby Google can't distinguish just one link repeated thousands of times from various pages of just one site.
Who loses with this glitch in place?
--Surfer: relevancy's out the window.
--Webmaster: must pay for this stupidity to keep up.
--Google: manipulated to return irrelevant results, massive lost revenue which should rightfully be spent on AdWords
Who gains?
--sleazy spammy link sellers doing evil
I wholeheartedly agree with you, Percetages. 'Site Rank' needs to become a new significant factor in Google's algorithms (using Latent Semantic Indexing), not just Page Rank.
Multiple votes obviously should count. I link to my important pages hundreds/thousands of times from my internal pages. I link to some trvial page once or twice. It would just be dumb for Google to not pay attention to how I am helping them determine what is important.
Ok, let's see. Pages. Each page having its own theme and its own ranking. So far so good.
What is a >worthless micro-domain that exists simply to be "exterior links"? Could you please describe what these look like in greater detail?
>Making distinctions is worthless.
Ah, so 10,000 purchased but completely irrelevant links which propel a page to #1 in the SERPS is good SEO, and enhances Google's search relevancy to the user;
buying position 1, in effect, is a good thing.
This helps Google determine what's important.
Glad you cleared that up for us, steveb.
Ah, so 10,000 purchased but completely irrelevant links which propel a page to #1 in the SERPS is good SEO, and enhances Google's search relevancy to the user
Why would a webmaster pay good money for links to propel him to the top of a serp with a page that is not relevant to the query? They wouldnt of course. The practice of paying for links is in fact probably doing the quality of search results good in many cases. Is it it good SEO? The guy sits #1 right?
<added>nice tip ogletree</added>
In most cases the rankings boost they received wasn't enough to get them to #1.
(and before the bullets start flying, I'm only talking about MY personal observations ;))
Of course? But of course. Of course of course of course.
What are you smoking?
Of course they buy links from anything which gives them PR.
(Anyone care to defend the legitimacy and relevance of -at best- 10,000 backlinks from just one general news site, just one blog, just one hosting site or just one all-topics directory?)
This isn't just from another planet, its from another galaxy. Jeezus, people propel themselves to the top serps they aren't relevant for all the time. In fact, this is probably more common than not. Who here wouldn't want to be #1 for every search ever done? As long as your listed page can convert profitably... most common example is any porn page... from being viewed by random web surfers, people will fight to be at the top of high volume searches.
===
luckychucky, I don't understand how people can just ignore the reality of the Internet. What possible difference does it make it I link to site1.com/page1.htm from site1.com/page2.htm or from site2.com/page17.htm? It's a completely meaningless difference. They are both my sites. All three are my pages. It's irrational to think that me linking from a different domain should somehow matter more (or less). It's the same thing.
"Ah, so 10,000 purchased but completely irrelevant links which propel a page to #1 in the SERPS is good SEO, and enhances Google's search relevancy to the user; buying position 1, in effect, is a good thing."
Um, no. I don't think you are understanding the problem you are seeing.
In fact, this is probably more common than not.
Interesting that you see this. In the many areas I follow, all the sites that purchase links are 100% relevant to the SERPS.
I doubt many folks would spend $5k per month buying anchor text links on totally random terms in the hopes of converting off topic traffic. :)
I know you have a gambling related site so you probably do run into the occasional pron spammers as they are generally the same webmasters but I highly doubt pron results are showing up as a result of them paying for links. More likely other methods
Purchasing links that point to page1 can help page2 (and three and four and page50).
My point is primarily that it is very common for sites to try to appear relevant for terms they aren't remotely relevant for, and this is a deliberate plan, because whatever they offer will appeal to a profitable amount of random searchers.
If you want to debate that the practice of purchasing text links leads to irrelevant search results, feel free to start another thread.
Yep...I mean no, but anyway. I once inquired about it to Google. One of my competitors (#1 no less) had a zillion links coming from his own site listed, and a zillion more from a news site, when I checked with the "link:etc." command.
Google's reply was that the links displayed by the link command were "for information only" and were *not* the basis on which Google evaluated the page rank, and that Google was smart enough to see through that.
So just because Google displays a zillion links from one web site does not mean it uses them all for ranking, if their reply was anything to go by.
Hope this makes you feel better about it. It sure did for me.
Cheers,
Sylver
It may boost your pagerank way up, but that's not going to get you to the top for some tough term. It may also bring lots of traffic if you use clever internal structure to target many niche terms on sub-pages.
Get authoritative inbounds from relevant sites and let them age. You'll beat him unless he ALSO has the the same.
Just checked msg1 again, it's all the other links.
It may boost your pagerank way up, but that's not going to get you to the top for some tough term.
I can attest to that. And btw, the increase in PR seems very minimal.
Google is smart enough to distinguish between "natural" backlinks and mass-produced ones for the purpose of advertising.
So, the way G does it seems fair to me:
1. You get minimal (negligible in my experience) PR and SERP boost (esp in competitive terms)
2. You get the extra exposure from the text link on high visibility pages
PS: But, I don't think Google puts much weight on on-page factors. Even for a totally non-competitive term, I wrote a page recently (in fact updated a Web page I wrote 9 years ago, for which there's no up-to-date equivalent all over the Web - that I could find). yet google promptly pushed the new page to #20 - #30 in the SERPs, vs #12 of the same page before changes.
I think Google is "penalising" even mildly SEO'd pages, i.e. when I put several words of text in anchortext, instead of "click here" or the URL itself.
On the other hand, Yahoo immediately brought that same page to #2 or #1 in its SERPs.
That's why imo Yahoo is better for NON-COMPETITIVE terms, and vice versa.
Why would a webmaster pay good money for links to propel him to the top of a serp with a page that is not relevant to the query? They wouldnt of course.
I bet that 5 years ago it would have been worded like this:
Why would a webmaster put good time and money into creating heaps of meta tags to propel him/her to the top of a serp with a page that is not relevant to the query.
This is the funniest this I have heard. Take a sample of 1000 webmasters targeting the same keyword and ask each one if they think there site is the most relevant and should be number 1. Guaranteed 100% response of yes.
I am trying a combination of:
allinurl and allinanchor but that does not work.
Any suggestions?
