Forum Moderators: martinibuster
[google.com...]
It states (in part):
Examples of link schemes can include:Link exchange and reciprocal links schemes ("Link to me and I'll link to you.")
I will carefully presume this guideline is more targeted towards some webmasters who participate in full duplex (fully automated) link schemes where links are obtained in high volume with little to no editorial control.
However, I wonder how this will affect those webmasters who obtain links sometimes through relevant link exchange while maintaining editorial control?
Is this Google webmaster guideline over-reaching?
Will this guideline affect how you link with other sites?
Do you think this guideline is fair?
Is Google dictating how webmasters will obtain relevant traffic apart from search returns?
If two sites in the same realm of interest need to (or even if they simply want to) link to each other, they should not have to worry about a private third party, such as a search engine, looking at that arrangement.
We link to several of our manufacturers so that customers can do further research, however most link back to us for the customer to search from. Is this going to be seen as a link exchange? How can they possibly penalize us or sites that do this? We're making our site good for our customers and is in no way doing a "link exchange"
How can they possibly penalize us or sites that do this? We're making our site good for our customers and is in no way doing a "link exchange"
I doubt that they are. I suspect that they are just looking for natural linking patterns which normally would include some reciprocal linking, and trying to eliminate sites that are getting the majority of their links from negotiated link exchanges made by webmasters or third party link developers, and not many links based on the site's own merits.
[edited by: Jane_Doe at 5:20 pm (utc) on July 25, 2007]
If two sites in the same realm of interest need to (or even if they simply want to) link to each other, they should not have to worry about a private third party, such as a search engine, looking at that arrangement.
As Jane_Doe suggests, there's no reason to assume that those site owners need to worry about reasonable and normal two-way links.
As for whether a "private third party, such as a search engine," should look at that arrangement, it's worth remembering that anything published on the open Web is visible to third parties (both private and public). That's why intranets were invented--and why Webmasters who want to avoid the scrutiny of search engines block crawlers with robots.txt.
I know this site that ranks #1 for some really really tough terms and has millions of inbound links.
But it also links back to every one of those sites.
Not only that, it also links back to every pages for each of these websites.
Then it goes and links to every other website on the entire Internet.
the site is Google.
would you like another example?
I thought of putting up a negative description or using nofollow, but just pulled the link altogether and will replace it with a straight, unreciprocated OBL to a quality site. It is awful tempting to notify their other "link partners" though.
Yahoo! with their web directory - and any web directory for that matter - should forget about ever being ranked in Google. Boo. Scary (insert sarcasm here)
Not gonna happen.
>Is this Google webmaster guideline over-reaching?
Yes
>Will this guideline affect how you link with other sites?
No, work as if Google doesn't exist, remember?
>Do you think this guideline is fair?
Nothing is fare. Ignore this blah from Google (there will be plenty more where this came from), keep doing what you were doing.
Quote of what google deems bad... "Buying or selling links"
G never said that, they said that buying or selling links for the purposes of gaining pagerank or gaming the engine isn't good.
Buying links with the intent of brining qualified partners to your website that will convert is ultimately fine. That being said, if you buy a link, traffic and conversion should be first and foremost on your mind.
I'm still not convinced that Google smells as much as SEO's thing they do here.
1. I see websites with lots of reciprocal links and very few of anything else ranking. One thing I have really noticed over the last year is a gradual "buying of hype" from large scale 'newsletters' that claim this or that in SEO without any logical proof or control studies. Because of the 'spread' of the message and the sheer numbers of readers, many junior SEO's read and believe the statements to be true without validating this themselves. This leads to massive changes without any real testing or knowledge of why changes are made.
2. I see websites with artificially created (three way etc) links and paid links doing very well.
My sense is that factors such as footprints, build time / rate, quality of pages, possibly theming fit the current scenario much better.
I get a whole lot of link exchange requests everyday, but I linkback only to the best of the sites. I carefully have a look at their products/services. content and the like. So how is this bad?
I get a whole lot of link exchange requests everyday, but I linkback only to the best of the sites. I carefully have a look at their products/services. content and the like. So how is this bad?
I get a whole lot of link exchange requests everyday, but I linkback only to the best of the sites. I carefully have a look at their products/services. content and the like. So how is this bad?
It's not, who said it was? :)
