Forum Moderators: open
Is this spamming by exclusion?
Frankly, this is getting rediculous. I wish Google would remove the page ranking from the toolbar because it's really being used for the wrong purposes. People should link to other sites based on content and the opportunity for relevant exchange of traffic, not for manipulation of and commercialization of Google page rank.
1. There is a limited number of "slots" on another web site (or yours). If either of you do a lot of link exchanging, every new one devalues those before. For example, you are not going to get a lot of Pr transfer from a PR 5 page with 20 links, and even less when they add 20 more.
Take this a step further, the more linking done on the web overall, reduces the value of all the links before. At one stage, people will not see any cost benefit, and sites that are not naturally suitable for linking (ecommerce etc) will just pay by PPC, PPI or whatever. I think that time is coming soon.
2. I *think" more value is given to links in a context of a para than simply lists of links. This would suggest that someone has actually done some work to "contextualise" the link. This is unusual for sites that link just for PR's sake.
3. Im pretty sure Google will introduce theming soon to reduce the problem by "contextualizing" Page Rank and maybe devaluing further "pure (non themed) page rank" in their algo.
4. Im pretty sure Google is at its peak of influence right now. There are other search engines that will influence the web. Every one "distorts" the web to some extent as the web is only the subtotal of its participants.
Those 4 reasons are why I dont think Google is "distorting" the web to any major extent. The real reciprocal linking activity is between commercial sites who dont attract links naturally - and the writing is on the wall, that for commercial sites you will have to pay for exposure just as in any other medium as the web matures. Thats what we do for our commercial sites. We decided months back that PPC was just more cost-effective than playing the free ranking game. On the other hand for our content sites, the reverse is very true.
I still think just ignoring all reciprocal links between sites, if possible (probably not), is the best answer.
...is that it can be hard for a new site to get links because some webmasters don't want to link to or exchange links with a low PR site.
...but at the same time if you are PR2 and asking for links from PR6 then are you not doing the exact same thing? Why not request PR0, PR1 & PR2 links which if they knew of PR would gladly link to you at PR2... in each case the likelihood of gaining links and PageRank is easier.
PR0 - 2 links are simple exchanges that you can nuture to PR8.
The added link and future potential for educating a site owner to the value of PageRank and links anchor means you now have a workforce developing their PageRank and yours by proxy.
Much more valuable IMHO than arguing that PR6 site have big egos, and Google caused it.
A related thread/post but focused on the anchor.
The importance of inbound anchor text
[webmasterworld.com]
[edited by: fathom at 9:33 am (utc) on Mar. 8, 2003]
I'm definitely in agreement with you on that issue Chiyo. I've found in-context links to provide the most value, to the surfer and for positioning.
The evidence is anecdotal at this point but in-context links are a bit harder to add to a page effectively (for the sole purpose of position benefit) than a link in a list on the LH nav.
I don't see many paragraphs that read:
In other news today the U.S. decided to (Buy Golden Widgets) [goldenwidgetsareus.com] rethink their policies on widget acquisition until the economy stabilizes. Greenspan's comments were cryptic and as a result, Wall Street took a slight dip before rebounding at the closing bell.
In any event, this medium is relatively new and will continue to experience growing pains. It's not quite the wild west anymore but it is still pretty lawless. There will be many more factors shaping and influencing the web and we're lucky enough to be part of it.
From the beginning of the Web, trading links, especially with relevant sites, was a natural process. To ignore reciprocal links because of abuse brought on by search engine manipulation would be a further distortion of the web and people would just get more creative about this form of search engine manipulation, as I suspect many already have.
What im saying is that recripocal linking is unnatural - not linking per se. IId say that 99% of links today are reciprocal in commercial areas. IId say that not counting those links towards PR would actually be doing any "natural" web linking a favour. I really dont think that people that link for non-Pr reasons will give a hoot and its only a small minority that are legitimate. It would also save many webmasters hours and hours of time and getting frustrated and bored out of their heads.
But as i said for the reasons i gave earlier, I dont think its a major problem, and certainly not close to "distorting the shape of the web". You can look in many other directions for that - inlcuding the affiliate game, PPC, PFI and the media monopolies to see where any so-called "distorting" may be going on. The web is living, breathing, growing organism. Some would say that it was distorted the first day someone put an ad on the web!
Due to the importance of PR and the popularity of link exchanges, Google is fully responsible for the creation of millions of ugly web pages filled with lists of links and banners. These pages are absolutely useless to the users, yet they commonly show up in SERPs. In that sense, I would say that Google is indeed distorting the shape of the web. It was great when one could surf from one nice site to another just following recommended links.
Today the value add is in the increase in ranking that links give you. Today the bump you get in the serps by having valuable links is what increases traffic and profit. It's a different world. As long as PR has such value, the web, at least the Google flavor, will get distorted by PR valuation.
C'mon I followed a thread just a week ago where people wer paying thousands of dollors for links!
Sigh. I miss Everyman. I wish he'd come back.
I rarely disagree with you, but in this case I really have to. In information areas of the web *natural* reciprocal linking is incredibly common. You link to people that are connected to you in some way, in addition to those sites that you recommend.
Removing the value of reciprocal links would actually warp the web in a different direction. If you link to me, then I don't dare link back to you.
gnu.org links to all their projects, and all their projects link back. Should these links not count because they are "reciprocal"?
On my own site, we review products. We link to the manufacturers of those products. They are not required to link back, but they often do because they like the reviews. Should these links be discounted?
I agree with the sentiment about the link "exchanges", but I'm not sure how it could be implemented without causing even more problems.
Still, I don't think Google would be successfull, if they tried to force the web into patterns of behaviour. One might argue the opposite is true: Google's tremendous success has largely come from the fact that they went along with the way the web has developed at the same time.
So from that point of view I expect Google, or another search engine aspiring to beat Google, to modify the way links are weighted.
Linking as fundamental ranking principle is something that will not go away anytime soon.
It needs to be taken to a higher level. The most obvious step to take would be what gets described with words like themeing, or contextualization.
The concepts are well known for a while, papers and studies from universities are published.
In fact it has been speculated for many months if this principle might already been applied in some small way.
Link to other websites that are relevant to your users - they will be greatful, it can be an important part of your "good content".
Get links from other quality sites that have a lot of *traffic* - they will link to you if your content is relevant to their users. (And yes - there may very well be an overlap with the sites you link to...). Links from discussion fora signatures (where allowed) can actually draw some quality traffic in their own right.
If you have a PR problem, solve it by getting into dmoz (it isn't that hard) and other directories. Anyone in dmoz with a PageRank below 5? Also, the more pages on your website, the higher your PageRank will generally become (assuming a good link structure).
Did adobe.com get a PR10 because of reciprocal linking ;-)
And finally, PR is only a small part of the google algo, so dont waste to much time on building PR unless you are in an extremely competitive area and have optimized your website completely...
This comment seems rather flip, considering how many sites are waiting to be reviewed, and waiting, and waiting ...
On a more positive note, I know from my own experience that it's possible to build a page to PR6 or even PR7 without benefit of DMOZ. It takes a lot of research to find appropriate sites to promote your link to, but it can be done.
Very interesting that Google archives EVERYTHING. You pretty much said so yourself just a few hours ago in the thread about resetting expired domains.
Are you archiving every site I visit? That doesn't seem ethical at all, no matter what yada yada I agree to.
The information Google currently track is pretty much harmless, and if you ask me, why shouldn't Google track what keywords you type in, and whatever else about people that voluntarily use its excellent search service? However, that said, there is widespread confusion and lack of knowledge about what it is possible to track using the internet, cookies, etc.
My reservation would be that it would be very easy for Google to step over the boundaries. Its control over the 'shape of the web' and massive reach could be too tempting for a company that at the moment has a deserved reputation for ethical behaviour. Most people that install the toolbar don't read the yada yada, whatever size and colour it's written in. And that's precisely how spyware companies are able to install software on so many computers.
Just some thoughts, even if they weren't as organised as I like. I think Google's influence is in danger of becoming negative, but I can hardly blame them if there isn't currently a comparable search engine to attract a decent volume of searchers.
Think seriously, how many clicks have you got from external links that come from exchanging a link with some other site. Its pretty small I guess, compared to someone who linked without asking. And i also ask you would you go to the effort of time and money in recripocal link campaigns if you though that the only benefits would be clicks from them and not PR? I know some reciprocal links are completely "natural" but my argument is that the great majority are not.
Also refer to my first post. My feeling is that recip linking is reducing in value anyway. The more done, the less PR recips pass on. Hopefully the practice will die out and I will get less than the dozen or more emails i get everyday (and much more for a month after one of our pages goes up a click in PR) - automated or semi-automated emails asking for a link exchange from people who have obviously never looked at our sites in any depth. Its pretty close to spam mail, and for me the less spam the better...
I do agree wholeheartedly with Heini however. If Google played with Page Rank and were able to make it (or synergise with other elements) to be theme-based and more intelligent in other ways, I think that would solve the problem to some extent, and would be a better solution that just ignoring PR for all reciprocal linking.
To start with, in February, I had 8 links that produced more traffic than my best keyphrase. All of these are links from places that gave me the links "naturally", and I also link to them for the same reason.
In fact I link to almost everyone in my industry. And if I don't link to them yet, I hope to sometime soon. That would make it so that I would never be able to get any on-topic links for PR.
I guess DMOZ would end up with around PR1 since I doubt that anyone would link to them that was not already in DMOZ.
Of course, figuring out how to do this sort of thing without hurting the innocent sites is why google takes so long to implement their filters.
Well the Web is changing and distorting all the time, and something as large and, ultimately, as useful as Google is bound to have an influence. The question is of course whether Google is exerting an *adverse* influence.
My personal opinion is that it exerts the influence that we, as webmasters, allow it. Clearly by choosing not to link to a site solely on the basis of that site's PR is allowing Google to adversely distort the shape of the Web, but it is more likely to adversely distort our own site's success.
Until late last year I was running a website about Web Services. When I set up the site (May 2001) I had little idea of how Google calculated its rankings, and I had never heard of Page Rank. I did, however, have a strong idea of how I thought the site should look, and what sort of content we should publish. I kept my head down and developed the best site I possibly could on Web Services.
As a consequence of this, we linked to any site that we felt provided useful relevant content to our readers, and those sites reciprocated for the same reason. I became aware of Page Rank around last September, but as I found that we had a PR of 8 at that point, I didn't consider it something I had to worry about. Now (as I write, March 2003), after several updates, the site is still enjoying a healthy PR 8, and a search for "Web Services" returns the site second, just behind the W3C, but ahead of the Web Services pages for IBM, Microsoft et al, with all of their marketing money and muscle. (IBM regularly linked to us, it has to be said.)
OK, so, give me a big hat.
As I am no longer working on the site, or indeed with Web Services, I have no particular axe to grind, but surely there is a lesson here. Google explicitly tries to reward sites that provide relevant content to readers. It does this using a complex algorithm, the exact details of which are secret, and subject to change at any time. The one thing that we know for certain (or as good as) is that Google will continually tweak the algorithm to ensure that, as far as possible, sites will be rewarded if they are providing relevant content to their readers. Short term hacks and reverse-engineering-second-guessing might have a limited effect, but by focusing on anything other than your content and your reader, you are always going to be paddling upstream as far as Google is concerned.
I have to say that this is an over simplification. I could make an excellent site full of useful content for readers that uses a javascript menu, for instance, and this would unoubtely harm my Google rankings. Many webmasters are now aware of this and many other rules that have started to change how we think about building websites, as a result of Google's algo.
>My personal opinion is that it exerts the influence that we, as webmasters, allow it
This is true, but again, I think is a little over-simplified. Because of Google's popularity and current stranglehold over internet search, there are many cases where if you don't keep up to date on what Google wants, you might never see any real traffic. This is not an option for many webmasters.
I am disputing your idea that webmasters 'allow it'. Clearly everyone chooses how to build their site, but I feel Google is often a major factor in the choice of layout, linking and yes, content - i'm sure we've all seen sites with excellent content where you can still see a rather over-deliberate use of keywords. Probably only noticeable to other webmasters, but it's still there.
yikes didn't mean area, but era.
[edited by: heini at 5:34 pm (utc) on Mar. 10, 2003]
Timing seems to play a role here though. If news breaks on a topic, and the news link is quickly found by GoogleBot, then it will often go to the top of page 1 and stay there (as long as you update content occassionally). This happened again just last month, news broke and I added a small page that was #1 of 1.6mil and it has stayed there.
If you wait several weeks, and the story goes stale, my experience is that it's impossible to force it to the top, no matter what you do.
When a page of nothing can be elevated to the point where it is offered to viewers as being relevant to their search..... then yes, Google is distorting the shape of the web.
And if Google de-emphasised the impact of off-page linking, would they change the shape of the web... most definitely.
Why do we now have a whole new cottage industry in link fabrication so as to manipulate search results ... Google.
And which SE gives results that all the other SE's strive for... Google.
Love it or loath it.... it certainly distorts (as in "impacts on") the shape of the web.
My contention is that the Internet is a means to derive information quickly. If I can provide a summary of the news event in a few hundred words, then provide several respected links for the related stories, then to many people (if not most), it IS an important page.
When you say the page "ranks high," I assume you mean high in SERPS. As far as PageRank, the sub-page is only a PR2, which counters what many believe that they have to have an astronomical PR value to get to the top of their keywords.
I wasn't... just making some general observations regarding the post's original topic and it so happened that the previous few posts had been talking about content. The "pages about nothing" was an off-the-cuff comment to illustrate a point.
My non-profit hosting site had a page rank 7 for 2 months. I added a few new hosted sites and links to my main page, and since they aren't ranked yet (I guess?) my rank dropped to 6. Now, I removed a few links to affiliates and hosted sites who were retooling, and I watched my rank bop from 6 to 7 to 6 to 7 and so on and so on.
That's not very comforting.
On another website I help manage, we broke news of a leaked alpha of a popular game brand. We were listed #1 when people searched for news. The forum thread where the information was reported recieved over 18,000 views in the span of a little less than a month and a half. Then, as time went on, our news post went down the listing, and so too did our page rank. What happened? Who knows? We lost a rank, and it looks like it will never come back.
Really, there is no way to win at this other than to write relevant content. I admit, I do not look away when an opportunity comes to write in a keyword. However, I still try to make the subject matter relevant. In the case of our hosting service, I write releases about our new hosted sites, and the occasional article related to our service.
In fact, it's something I look for in potential hosted sites. Since our hosting service caters to game fansites, and clan sites, it's fundamental to our hosting assessment process that the prospective hosted site's web team write strong content. I place more importance to this over page rank any day (although we do consider how they might rank)
And as far as affiliations, those are great. I know for a fact our site has benefitted from our associations. Had those associations not benefitted our site, people would have a very hard time finding us.
So yeah, Google is controlling the web to a certain extent. But, is it a good thing or a bad thing? I couldn't tell you either way.
I just want to say Google wrote their own ticket in this new market... Just do what they say... think of your customers and your users first... If you do this, everything else will fall in place... forget about PR this or that! If you have the best product... that has nothing to do with Google... Google takes pride in promoting your product or service if it's worthy.. If you have the best product then you will show up first... I live by these words and its very cleansing to live this way.. sort of a ZEN...SEO.. I think everyone knows deep down how great their product is... If it's deserves top 10 placement your customers will decide... it's pure common sense.. If you want to be number one get out your pic ax and your head lamp and start digging like rest of us… the yellow brick road is about 100 feet down so get those sleeves rolled up and start mining..
I requested a link exchange from another site and this was the response that I got back from that site:
>>Your site has a google PR of ZERO. This likely means your site has >>been penalized for inaproppriate search engine promotion tactics. >>I suggest you buy a new name for your site.
It's so nice to know that people just go by numbers and do not even know the process that they are given by!
