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Google Algo is Smart in Filtering Inbound Links

         

jamesyap

5:46 pm on Jan 21, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I am quite sure that google now ignore/reduce PR vote from guestbook links. Since I saw a site who sign 1000+ guestbooks has a PR of only 5.

SMART.

Another thing I notice. For sites who uses some auto/semi-auto (not machine gun) link exchange tools, such as linksmanager and zeus doesn't have a PR they deserve.

I seen site with 3000+ inbound links with only PR6.

Google are not blind. Only deserve links get more weight while links from guestbooks, message boards, mailing list, forum, groups, and now links page will lost weight or even ignore!

I do really really think link page has less weight. I bet those pages with filename links.html or link-exchange.html will be cursed.

Just imagine you are google researcher and you want to return more quality results, would you put much weight on outbound links from link page/link exchange program?!

soapystar

7:16 pm on Jan 21, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



thats a good post..id like to exchange links with you!..please go straight to my link exchange page.....one you have placed a link to me i will reciprocate...

vitaplease

8:12 am on Jan 22, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



jamesyap,

also take into consideration that a guestbook page with 300+ links is a heavy diluter of Pagerank transfer...

rfgdxm1

8:18 am on Jan 22, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



That is what I was thinking vitaplease. The very problem with the idea of trying to improve PR by signing guestbooks is they usually have low PR, and so many outbound links that the guestbook link is near worthless. If anyone wants to get anywhere signing guestbooks, they need to find that mythical PR8 guestbook with 3 links on it that I have alluded to before.

Canary

8:33 am on Jan 22, 2003 (gmt 0)



This is probably a really stupid question and has been answered before.

But how does Google or any other SE distinguish between a links page and a web directory?

hakre

8:46 am on Jan 22, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



hi canary,

thats a question i asked myself, too. i also have got a long link page on one of my pages. i ever liked to link because it's such a nice thing in the web. does google now honor this or is it a no-no. how does the algo digs in?

but they'll never tell what kind of fuzzy-reciprocal-polymorphal logik they programmed, or the link-farm freaks will takeover google completely ;)

vitaplease

9:18 am on Jan 22, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



But how does Google or any other SE distinguish between a links page and a web directory?

Canary,

I assume you mean distinguish between a link-farm links page and a web directory?

The links in a link-farm links page all tend to predominantly link to each other. You might find them clustered together in the "similar pages" function of Google.

The links on a web directory page predominantly link naturally, one way towards the resources.

tigger

10:05 am on Jan 22, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



One of my competitors hit's the GB's hard and has over 200 backward links showing most GB's but his PR is still 5 and has been for the last 6mths

DaveN

11:42 am on Jan 22, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I am monitoring over 500 GB 5 of which were PR7
over 80 of the GB have lost some PR and All the PR7 are Grey bar now.

ran a test site with only Guestbook links still ranking and holding PR even though the inbound pr is falling fast i think the site will only last 1 maybe or 2 updates, Then I will take the site down.


DaveN

tigger

12:47 pm on Jan 22, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I'm glad you ran that test Dave I was thinking about doing the same on a spare domain just to see what happened, could you keep us informed what happens after the next update

jamesyap

4:51 pm on Jan 22, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



1. Do you guys think google will reduce weight on a page named links.html or other extension?

2. I am opening a new thread on PR vs # of links. [webmasterworld.com...] Please discuss.

[edited by: jamesyap at 5:47 pm (utc) on Jan. 22, 2003]

tigger

5:01 pm on Jan 22, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



jamesyap

remove the . after your link

tig's

hakre

5:11 pm on Jan 22, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



you can take that link instead, the topic jaime urled is leading there, too.

[webmasterworld.com...]

some other question:
i have a link-page that links to many other pages related to the same issue. often these pages link back to my site on their link-page, too. does this mean, google will treat this as link-farms? that would be totally wrong.

BigDave

5:50 pm on Jan 22, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



DaveN,

Is it just the GB pages that went grey or did it influence the rest of the site?

That would be an easy way to keep high ranking GBs from being abused, just identify those that have a really high PR and just remove that *page* (not the site) from the index. It doesn't really penalize anyone.

jamesyap asks:

1. Do you guys think google will reduce weight on a page named links.html or other extension?

Absolutely not! Google loves links pages!

In fact, the first month Google came to my site, they only spidered my root and my 3 links pages links.php?type=<category>. They know that links pages are the best place to find links to other sites that they may not know about.

Unlike Guestbooks, links pages are controlled by the webmaster. And remember that the VAST majority of websites are run by people who do not know or care what PR is. They also know nothing about the idea of reciprocol linking. They just put up a links page to stuff they like, which is what google wants to see.

jamesyap

5:58 pm on Jan 22, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I think as long as the link in a page is kept < 100, google won't consider it as link farm. Somemore link page are access from your root page, if your root page has real contents, you won't need to bother about the link farm stuff. I have seen so many real link farm treaten as none link farm (and even with PR6)!

jamesyap

6:00 pm on Jan 22, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



VAST majority of websites are run by people who do not know or care what PR is. They also know nothing about the idea of reciprocol linking

GOOD POINT! By the way, what is GB? haha ...

DaveN

4:53 pm on Jan 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



BigDave

Just the GB pages not the site.

see another 10% turn grey today.

DaveN

jamesyap

5:28 pm on Jan 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Ohh GB = guestbooks ;)

rfgdxm1

6:14 pm on Jan 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



>And remember that the VAST majority of websites are run by people who do not know or care what PR is.

And, the problem with guestbooks is the vast majority of signers are people who sign guestbooks with no concern about PR. Somebody here recently posted they were into geneology, and always signed other geneology site guestbooks for greater exposure. I know a woman who absolutely insists on signing the guestbook of any site she finds if she notices it has a guestbook. She must have signed hundreds over the years. Guestbooks mostly are put up by webmasters who have them so people can stroke their ego and say they found and liked their site. Particularly useful for webmasters on free hosts that don't have access to stats, or on pay hosts and don't have log analysis software. The guestbook is the only way they know people found their site. The flaw is Google's that they have been slow at recognizing guestbooks, and just not ignoring the links on them. Hopefully the original poster in this thread is right, and Google is fuguring out how to ignore guestbooks rather than to try and penalize sites that appear in guestbooks.

FillDeCube

6:41 am on Jan 24, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Hi I am new here.
I happen to know a few sites that has lots of banklink from GB (more than 1000+).. They are doing very well.. So I think GB trick still work.

rfgdxm1

6:47 am on Jan 24, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Are you sure that site that has 1000+ guestbook links isn't doing well because they happen to also have a few non-guestbook links with high PR, and are also doing other things right such as good on page and on site optimization for search engines? There are many sites out there with zero guestbook links that are doing very well too. Those guestbook links may just be superfluous.

FillDeCube

6:54 am on Jan 24, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



rfgdxm1,
one of the site that I mentioned has only 2 pages in total and has no content (well almost) except affiliate links.

FillDeCube

7:09 am on Jan 24, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I have created a site (3 pages only) recently and had sign-up about 1000 GB and no single proper site is linking to it. It is being visited by google bot everyday. The site has no PR (grey bar) at this time.
I hope my site will have a new PR after coming google dance... and if any one of you would like to know the result do remember to sticky mail me by then..

rfgdxm1

7:35 am on Jan 24, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Google doesn't care if a site has only 2 pages of affiliate links. If the pages are well SEOed, and it has just a few substantial inbound links, that could be enough to do well without guestbook links.

FillDeCube

8:22 am on Jan 24, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



As I know google rank a page by counting the "vote" of other page to the page. Even if a page is a frame (frame with no content but with a proper title) and it is being link by a page with PR8 or PR9 it will still rank well.

And hence if a page is being voted many times from different GB, I think it will still get high PR too..

Anyway, I will have my report card from google by early next month. Do leave me a message if you would like to know it..

:)

rfgdxm1

8:31 am on Jan 24, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Just post the response here. I'll be shocked if you have a high PR page.

BigDave

9:27 am on Jan 24, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



FillDeCube,

I think you are missing 2 important points. Toolbar PR is shown on a logrithmic scale, and the PR vote of a page is divided by the number of links on that page.

Just to give you the benefit of the doubt, and work with the most generous numbers that I can find. Toolbar log base of 4, and a damping factor of .1. I will also assume that all the Guestbooks are a PR4 and that there are only 30 links per page including internal navigation links. You could possibly get a PR6.

If we just change those numbers slightly to make them just a little bit more believeable. Toolbar average PR of 3, .15 damping factor, log base of 6, and 40 links per page. You are now a PR4.

And I think those numbers are also being very generous in your favor.

What is the PR of all those guestbooks that you signed? What was the total link count on each of those pages? Did any of them use javascript to make the link? How much time did you spend signing 1000 guestbooks?

FillDeCube

3:23 pm on Jan 24, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



bigDave,
thanks for sharing the calculation formula butta I got a fail in my maths subject..
I have just written a small program to auto signing GB.. so it took me 2 hours to write it and almost 1/2 day to grap GB url and about 45mins to sign all of them.. so it is not really a big effort..
Cheers

jamesyap

4:05 pm on Jan 24, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Hey sell your script for $50 and I think you can make millions since most spammers will be interested!

rfgdxm1,

You don't need to hire a bored teen or teach your kids to sign 1000+ GB anymore! Just buy it for $50 from FillDeCube to attack anyone you want.

I don't know how googleguy will response to this! ;) But once they realize there are such a tool, I don't think they will ban a site so easier anymore.

rfgdxm1

7:25 pm on Jan 24, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Given that most guestbooks use a relatively small handful of standardized scripts, it should be rather trivial to write a bot to search for all guestbooks with that script, and when found sign it and move on. That FillDeCube actually did it proves the point. This is why I wrote before all Google has to do is a variation of what FillDeCube. In the case of Google, when their bot finds a guestbook it doesn't sign it, but instead just sets a flag for the algo that means "ignore all links on this page". Google would have to be totally incompetent to be banning sites for guestbook links with bot like FillDeCube's out there in existence. And, if they do FillDeCube can really make good money selling this bot to people who want to get their competitor's site out of Google, or just want to use it against site's which they disagree with politically, for personal reasons, etc. ;)
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