SEO News and Information - The Topositionseo Blog

Google: Poor Incoming Links Don’t Hurt

As far as the search engines are concerned, it has long been speculated and claimed that receiving links from “bad neighborhoods” could hurt a website; you know, those pill-n-casino sites. It makes perfect sense - if you run around with spammers, getting link benefit from them, the value and integrity of your site should be questioned, as well.

Not so, says Vanessa Fox of the Google Sitemaps team:

In general, linking to web spammers and “bad neighborhoods” can harm your site’s indexing and ranking. And while links from these sites won’t harm your site, they won’t help your indexing or ranking. Only natural links add value and are helpful for indexing and ranking your site.

This also makes sense. How can you be responsible for the linking practices of a third party?

In any case, this seems to be a deviation from the inherently ambiguous language of their Webmaster Guidelines:

Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

Then again, it is from the horse’s mouth. Take it with a grain of salt, if you will.

Text Link Brokers’ Link Building Wiki

Link building got you down? Check out Text Link Brokers’ new Link Building Wiki. It’s a bit rough around the edges, but it does serve as a nice central repository for all those link building forum threads and blog posts you’ve seen referenced again and again. There’s nothing mindblowing here, but it is shaping up to be a nice resource. I like the link building tools section.

Rand on Matt Cutts on the Google Sandbox

Rand of SEOmoz has a nice analysis of Matt Cutts in an interview with Mike Grehan on the topic of the Google Sandbox:

1. The sandbox as we perceive it is not a myth, but a real phenomenon (we’ve had this confirmed in the past, but always in person rather than in a recording that could be transcribed)
2. Matt (and Google) recognize that certain content is not being made “available” to searchers and the reasons deal with “how much do you trust certain pages”
3. In order to get out of the sandbox (or dodge it entirely), you must “capture the mind of the blogosphere” which is “the best way to let search engines find out about you too.”

I would also emphasize that your SEO focus (industry) also plays a role in avoiding the Sandbox. A “light” industry typically sidesteps the Sandbox nicely.

That said, it seems that “linkbait” is the key to avoiding the Box entirely (as well as the key to serious link building). Before you even start developing your website, determine what makes you stand out. Will anyone care about your site/product/offering? If you can answer that question effectively, you’ll get your links. A couple well-placed emails to some industry bloggers can easily get the ball rolling here.

Google’s Big Daddy Choke

Barry Schwartz over at the Search Engine Watch blog points to a piece in the Register about Google’s Big Daddy update and their subsequent storage problems.

The Register reports that Google is “choking on web spam” ever since the roll out of The Big Daddy Infrastructure. The article highlights a mention from Google CEO Eric Schmidt from last month talking about Google having a storage “crisis.”

Backlink Strategies - No More Home Page Links

What pages should you get your links from? That’s the question posed in an excellent post by Jim Boykin on his personal blog. His suggestions:

Go for the most relevant page.

I’d go to google and search [site:theirsite.com keyword phrase] to find the most relevant page. Relevance is a big factor. If I sell Green Widgets, and they’ve got a specific page on Green widgets, that would be a great page to get a link from.

And go for the most powerful internal page.

I’d go to Yahoo and search [site:theirsite.com]

The nice thing about Yahoo is that they tend to list pages in order of importance. Same goes for a “linkdomain” search in Yahoo (the best backlinks tend to be towards the top of results). This hold true for a “Site:” search with Yahoo. The best “internal pages” tend to be listed first.

Good advice.