So it finally happened! Google caught everyone that is buying and selling links and dropped their PageRank. The world is over and Google has taken over the internet. The time has come for all SEO’s to hang up their SEO shoes and move on to PPC, right? Or is it?

I have been trying my best to follow the myriad of hoopla going on on message forums and blogs in addition to follow the trends and patterns of sites that I follow in order to draw some educated conclusions on what actually happened and how it will effect websites and the SEO industry. I have composed a series of questions that average Joe Webmaster is asking right now.

What happened?

Good question! I’m glad I asked. Back in early summer (of 2007), Google, through Matt Cutts and other employees publicly declared war on paid links. Specifically, they announced that according to their guidelines, website owners or webmasters cannot sell PageRank for the purposes of improving the organic ranking of other sites. This irked many people on the web who proclaimed that they are advertising to monetize their sites and Google cannot tell them what to do. Conversely, Google requested that such “advertisers” either declare their outbound ad links as paid (sponsored, supported, what have you), edit them with a nofollow attribute, make them JavaScript, or some form of other means of not passing PageRank such as a redirect.

In the meantime, Google was busy promoting their “report paid links” feature and collecting data from Webmasters and SEO’s who have been busy ratting out their competitors (each other).

A few weeks back, new broke that Google has devalued many directories that accept payment for links but offer no real value. They proclaimed that directories with a true editorial review were untouched, while those that simply sell links to anyone and everyone have been devalued.

Last week, news broke that many high profile sites (forbes.com, washingtonpost.com, daily.stanford.edu, searchenginerountable.com, searchenginejournal.com, statscounter.com and many notable bloggers) have had their (toolbar) PageRank value reduced. Some lost 2 points, others lost more.

This week, many others have reported some PageRank fluctuations. Many lost PageRank while some gained, yet others stayed the same—and the panic began.

What did Google really do?

The following is my opinion of what Google did. Over the last few months, I have found Google to be dramatically editing its main ranking algorithm. Search results have been unsteady at best with 2, 3, 4 page shifts from day to day for no apparent reason. Changes like this can usually be attributed to datacenter variances, but I do not believe that was the case. The results were too similar across multiple IP’s.

In case you don’t know, the Google Toolbar PageRank value is only updated every so often. In fact, until this recent one in October, the last one was in May, 2007. That means that the visible PageRank can be one value while the actual PageRank that Google uses is usually different and one that is much more granular than a 0-10 scale. So all of these changes have happened a while ago (and no one was in a panic) but once the visible PageRank started to show, everyone freaked. Why?

Google claims to not perform manual index adjustments (Google handjobs), but it has been pretty well documented that they do. I believe they manually “adjusted” some of the more prominent sellers by docking them some PageRank, and thus potentially lowering their income from paid links since so many people buy links according to PageRank. Additionally, I think they used a combination of some algorithmic magic, paid link reports, and manual checks from employing half of China to detect some of the sellers and dock them some PageRank. I do not think buyers were affected.

Additionally, I believe an algorithm tweak has occurred that has devalued and reduced the PageRank of sites that participate in extensive reciprocal linking. I have seen this firsthand on sites that I frequent observe.

So to get back to why you lost PageRank: because the total PageRank on the internet was reduced and this caused a rain down effect on the rest of the sites that those sites link to. Its sort of like 6 degrees of separation: every indexed site is somehow linked to every other site. So when many sites had their PageRank reduced due to selling links and reciprocal linking, this reduction of total PageRank effected every site they are linking to down the line. Less PageRank for them means less PageRank for you—simple as that.

I don’t buy or sell links. Why did I lose my PageRank?

This has been one of the major underlying facets I’ve seen all over the internet this week. Everyone that lost PR thinks they were wrongfully tagged as buying or selling links and there is mass panic. I can bet that Google was flooded with reinclusion requests this week. What is there to reinclude? People have been literally freaking out over the loss of a PageRank point. They come from far and wide asking how to fix it before their house gets repossessed.

What if I sell links—what will happen?

It really depends how you sell them. Is selling links evil? No, in my opinion, it is not evil. I believe it is a form of advertising. Google asks that you declare them as paid links or apply an attribute that will not allow the passing of PageRank. The question everyone wants to know is what will happen if they sell links yet do not declare them as paid? Its hard to say, but it seems that Google has decreased the PageRank of some of them. Also, some sites that do declare their links as paid have also lost PageRank.

What if I buy links—what will happen?

There is a good chance that if they are good links, your positions in search engines will improve! Will you be hurt in any way? Probably not, but I would avoid buying links from sellers that clearly state that their links are all sponsored. I would insure that the link buying is progressive and natural using a variety of natural-sounding anchor texts from a variety of sites over a progressive amount of time. Many notable people in the industry such as Rand Fishkin and Jim Boykin have blatantly proclaimed that they have bought links for their clients in front of a panel of Google Engineers at conferences.

How can Google detect paid links?

They won’t say, nor will they confirm that they can. They have simply said that they may take action against sites that they believe to be selling links. One way I believe it is possible to detect un-proclaimed paid links is to analyze the outbound link neighborhoods. If a blog site has 5 posts on its homepage that are linking to sites about credit counseling, herbal Viagra, online bingo games, SEO India, and mortgages, its pretty easy to tell that those are sponsored reviews. If I can tell by looking at a site for 5 seconds, I’m pretty sure Google has the technical prowess to do this algorithmically.

Does it really matter?

No. I don’t think it does one bit unless you are a major link seller and you base your mortgage payments on that little green bar. In which case, I think it may be a good time for you to develop a new business model because this particular one may be coming to an end.

I do not believe PageRank to be a big ranking factor at all. In fact, I believe its main purpose is public relations (get it, PR?) and being able to get a major industry reaction with such actions. I believe PageRank plays a roll in denoting the importance of a page in order to allocate crawling resources. So in my opinion, PageRank is only important if you sell links or have a huge site with the need to efficiently distribute PageRank across your 450,000 pages.

It has gotten to the point of an obsession. Words like “doomsday” have been thrown around. To add to the hysteria, PageRank fluctuations can occur depending on the datacenter the user has hit. So people reporting a drop from PR5 to PR4 have been frantically removing links and putting nofollow attributes on their paid links to come back in an hour, hit a different datacenter and report a PR5 again. This does nothing but perpetuate the rumor of Google being able to detect all paid links. What is essentially happening is Google is getting all of these Webmasters to admit to selling links by tagging them as nofollow!

 

I bet Matt Cutts and everyone else are sitting back and having a good old laugh over all this. I know I am. If you think about it, Google has used its influence over the industry through the use of PageRank to send people into fear, panic, and raise their hands in submission by revealing their paid links. I don’t think anyone can really substantiate a drop in rankings or traffic due to this update.

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Link Attributes, Link Valuation, and Link Scale

In Part I of Explaining Link Building to External Clients, we provided a high level overview of link building to clients. We defined link building, explained the need for it, and mentioned the basics of how link building is performed. In this second installment, let us discuss the specific makeup of links, how they work, what aspects help and what aspects do not.

Link Valuation

How do we quantify links and determine which links are good, which are bad, and which are just ok. Here are some of the major quality factors that are accepted by most SEO’s as being ranking factors (I will also put them in quality order based on my opinions and observations):

• Type of link (HTML text)
• Link anchor text
• Link destination page
• Domain theme
• Page theme (relevance)
• Domain authority
• Link profile of linking page
• Link profile of linking domain (the same linking properties of this page from other pages)
• Link age/trust
• Content and text around link
• Link location on page
• Title tag of linking page
• Link ability to pass PageRank
• PageRank
• Number of other outbound links on page

Here are questions to ensure of when analyzing the value of a link (again, in order):

• Is the linking page indexed?
• Is this link being crawled?
• Is the link a standard HTML text link?
• Does the link pass PageRank (no follow meta tag, no follow attribute, no script tag)?
• Does the link have a 302 temporary redirect on the path?
• Would a search engine deem this link to be natural and editorial?

All of these attributes add up to the ranking improvement value of a link in relation to the page and other pages on the domain that use the link weight being passed down in the navigational hierarchy structure. The ideal link will be one that is standard HTML text where the anchor text is a keyword of focus on the destination page. The overall theme and link profile of the linking page, when closely matched to your page, will be highly valuable and is the ideal situation. Content around the link helps improve the value of that page alone and the link itself. As long as it is being crawled and passes link value, the PageRank of the page where the link is will help improve your page’s PageRank.

Link Scale

I would like to propose a simple way to quantify the value of a link. While it is based on arbitrary considerations and valuations, I believe it can be used as a rough estimate as to the value (and possible price) of a link. Each link will have a 0-10 point scale system, much like PageRank. We must make some assumptions that would not add point credit to the score:

• The linking page must be indexed
• The link is standard HTML text without any scripting attribute or redirect
• The link is crawled

3 points – if the anchor text of the link closely matches the keyword focus of the page
2 points – if the site is an aged, trusted site, with a good link profile itself
2 points – if the page and content of the site is relevant to the keyword and your sites theme
1 point – if the link has been on a site for over 6 months
1 point – if the linking page has less than 100 links
1 point – if the PageRank of the linking page matches or is higher than your page
= 10 points

Obviously, this is quite arbitrary with the possibility of minor variations and inconclusive determinations of point assignment, but there is currently nothing better out there.

Trust

Domain trust is regarded as an important ranking factor for inbound links as well. In order to rank well for competitive keywords, being in Google’s ‘circle of trust’ is vital. Google’s trust filter is set higher than any other engine’s algorithm. The only way to gain trust is with high quality links from other trusted sites which have been in place for some time. This implies that links have an aged-delay factor much like a new domains’ aging delay (AKA sandbox effect). Therefore acquiring links and maintaining them from sites that are themselves trusted and aged is the required method of improving those same aspects in your site.

In the next installment, we will discuss the knowledge transfer aspect of
SEO, why it is important for link development and how it is best performed.

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Explaining the Need for Link Building During your SEO Campaign

In the first installment of the five-part series about explaining link building to external clients, let us start by talking about defining and explaining the need for link building. Posted below are some questions that we often encounter as being asked by the client. The agency perspective is unique because we often work with everyone from the company CEO or President, who only has a general understanding of marketing principals and strategies but does not know specific details of search marketing or search engine optimization, to the in-house SEO who knows the ins and outs of search engine optimization but does not have the resources to properly scale the projects.

We often found ourselves in the position of having to explain linking building 101. We actually prefer this—it is best to have a fresh mind with no biases or misinformation absorb your knowledge rather than spending much more time dispelling fallacies and misnomers. We firmly believe that educated and informed clients are the best ones. I hope this general overview and explanation of need suffices the various levels of management looking at search engine optimization as a marketing strategy and acts as a catch-all definition for link building.

What is Link Building?

Link building is the natural and ‘inspired’ acquisition and maintenance of inbound links from other sites (domains) to your site (domain). Link building usually requires a variety of creative and analytical methods to persuade a website owner to link to your site or find the right site upon which to place a link. Link building has 2 primary purposes: to improve the organic rank of the page and site being linked to and to have real human visitors click on the links and actually visit your site and provide value in qualified traffic.

Why is Link Building Important?

The concept originated with Google’s PageRank algorithm (named after Larry Page, co-founder of Google). The concept analyses hypertextual and image inbound links from others sites as quality, relevance, and importance indicators directed at the specific page and the domain. These ‘votes’ or ‘citations’ are currently used by every major search engine including Google, Yahoo, MSN/Live, and Ask.com. I often state the value of link development as being 49.9% of SEO. This means that link building is highly important to SEO and will have huge benefit to the entire effort. However, to be effective and rank well, especially for competitive keywords, all of the other SEO factors must be in place and well-tuned to take full advantage of on-page and off-page SEO aspects.

Search engines also have limited crawling, indexation, and storage resources. This means that link building is important to denote the value and importance of your pages which helps to maintain your valuable inside pages in the main indexes of the search engines in addition to ranking them. Look at almost any popular Google search engine results page and you will find a Wikipedia.org listing somewhere on the first page as an example of the power of inbound links. The entire domain’s ‘link profile’ is so powerful that it ranks each of the focused pages for almost any term it describes.

How Do we Position and Apply Links?

The ideal way to position links is to point the text link from a site with a good link profile itself that is related to your site. This delves into domain theme, linking communities, and link profile, which we will cover in a later installment. The link’s anchor text (link hypertext) should closely match the main keyword of the page that we are focusing on (more on link attributes in a later installment as well) and the link should point directly to the page of that keyword. This is a brief general explanation of how one can approach acquiring and positioning a good quality link that is sure to pass good ranking value as well as drive natural traffic.

What Type of Link Building is Done?

There are many methods of link building so please note that by no means is this intended to be an exhaustive list of types and strategies. The intent is to try and acquire links from the most relevant sites that will also drive traffic from users of those sites following the links. Here are some standard link building approaches:

• Link bait – publishing naturally good content that people will want to link to
• Paid links – direct purchase or monthly rental
• Article syndication – allowing the use of content for a backlink
• Press releases – distribution through a network with a link included
• Product/Service reviews – customer reviews and referral link back
• Reciprocal linking – exchanging links with a qualified site
• Directory submissions – suggesting various pages to directories
• Direct placement – link placement on specialty sites
• Leverage social media - social bookmarking and publishing

Stay tuned for Part II where we will discuss Link Valuation, Link Attributes, and The Link Scale.

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