Forum Moderators: martinibuster
what you people think?
A link from an affiliate viagra site won't hurt you. Why would it? Anyone here who has a large site with high rankings will see, when they check their backlinks, that they have hundreds or thousands of unsolicited links from dmoz clones, scrapers, and sites that just felt like linking to them. You have no control over who links to you and you can't be penalized for it. You can run into trouble if you link out. Is a link from the BBC better than a link from the affiliate viagra site? If it has more pagerank to pass and offers better anchor text, and is surrounded by relevant text yes. If not, the links may be of equal relative value.
"Many of the penalties you say don't exist have been specifically mentioned as possibilities for webmasters to consider as a possible cause of lowered rankings from time to time in posts here at WebmasterWorld or in blogs by people who actually work for Google."
Their answers tend to be hazy and nebulous, and unstandably so. To date, I've not read a single comment by a google employee that says:
1. you should avoid internal linking.
2. you should avoid submitting to directories.
3. you should encourage those who link to you to use anchor text other than your keywords.
I've also not read a single comment by a google employee that says:
1. if you get a link from the wrong directory, you're up s**t creek.
2. if the directory that was GOOD when you obtained a link from it later turns BAD (something beyond your control) and becomes part of a bad neighborhood, you're up s**t creek.
3. if you get decide to advertise on other sites and those sites fail to use rel="nofollow" (again, beyond your control), you're up s**t creek.
"made for SEO directories "
To be honest, I would categorize every single directory as such. Yahoo is pay for play. Dmoz is about getting tons of crap links from clone sites. Do webmasters submit to directories because they want to be associated with wonderful directories? No. They submit to them to acquire links. And whether the directory is a link farm or a site that exercises editorial discretion is not always obvious. I guess one way of finding out would be to submit a batch of sites, ranging from decent to absolutely horrible, to see the pattern of directory admission and denial used by a directory. Perhaps this has already been done and perhaps this accounts for why some directories have had their pagerank stripped. But a directory being penalized doesn't have a thing to do with the sites that are listed in the directory unless they've linked back to the directory, and probably not even then unless a clear pattern of manipulation emerges.
If you read some of the statements issued by Matt Cutts, it becomes fairly obvious that google is looking for patterns of algorithm manipulation. He's also made statements regarding purchasing of links for advertising and the position enunciated is that it is up to the seller of the advertising link to indicate when links are votes, or simply advertising, by using rel="nofollow".
I believe this is google's approach to evaluating most linking relationships. The burden is on the linker, not the linkee. Otherwise, as many others have said hundreds of times before, you could easily sabotage your opponents.
Webmasters are always looking for signs of unfairness or penalities, when, in actuality, they should be looking at 1. their sites, and 2. their competition.
1. Except for DMOZ waste of time because the SE ignore directory entries as Spam, anyway.
2. Negative impacts because some SE might give penalty points due to spammy links
3. And Vincevincevince has concerns about getting part of a link farm. (see below)
For 1., I suppose we all heard about inheriting PR from DMOZ. And MsHuggys here just reported about experiencing it from her own directory. So, no, it doesn't look like SE ignore directories.
For 2., if one could gather penalties from spammy links, well, here the bad guy comes annihilating the PR of his competitor. Fun experiment: link google at junk farms and see if google's PR drops :). I suppose no SE would be mechanical on this matter.
If I'm a bit concerned, it's about 3. Vincevincevince's scenario is actually like this: Link farm -> Me -> Jim -> Link farm
But even then a SE shouldn't punish Me. The evil guy is certainly "Link farm", but a single link from Jim or Me shouldn't make a difference.
Summing up I still assume Directories are quite valuable for the search engines.
