It is mid-April and here on Southern Vancouver Island, this is the short space of time linking the rainy period and the dry period into some sense of the seasons. That’s what got me thinking about linking, that and the fact I am hosting a telepanal of link-building experts as part of the second Metamend BrainJam on Friday afternoon.
Links are not normally thought of as an interesting topic to think about but this week especially, lots of other people in the search engine and SEO sectors are thinking heavily about links. Aside from the fact many of us have just returned from SES NY, (nice pub crawl eh Glenn?), and links were a major subject of discussion there, an extra amount of attention has been paid to links recently, especially paid links.
Matt Cutts, Google’s Quality Czar, recently asked webmasters and Google users to report any and all paid links by noting them on their own pages or by contacting Google to inform them when they are found on others. Predictably, this has the SEO community buzzing, especially those with businesses, blogs or websites that depend on paid links.
Most in the SEO community, myself included, are more than a little ruffled by Matt’s post. It is bizarre that Google builds a ranking algorithm that relies on links but is unable or unwilling to see how those links will be treated as commodities. Whatever happened to all on-page elements being “of benefit to the user?”
Andy Beal’s comments best sum up the feelings of most SEOs:
“How many more trojan horses Matt? Nofollow was supposed to help us point out links we can’t vouch for, now Google wants us to use it on paid links. Now, the spam report – which we thought was supposed to be used for reporting spam activity – is to be used to report “suspected†paid links?
What’s next? Asking us to share our Google Analytics data so you can weed out the pages that users don’t find interesting?With all due respect, this is going too far!”
Links are the arteries of the Internet, the pathways that allow its blood (user-traffic) to flow. There are dozens of legitimate reasons a paid-link might be placed on a page, business advertising being just one of them.
We will have a lot to discuss at Friday’s BrainJam session. I am hoping to use this weeks’ postings (there should be a few more than usual) as a primer on the conversation.
The first thing we will want to discuss is the hierarchy of links found on or direct to any given page. There is a lot to think about there including, the trustworthiness of the links, how they are phrased, what the web of links they are joining looks like, etc… .
Next, we will move towards contextual relevance and how Google and other search spiders gauge or perceive relevance between linked documents.
Lastly, we will get into link longevity, maintenance and expansion.
That’s a lot to think about and a lot to cover in the few hours we’ll have to cover it. We will have some interesting guest speakers as well as our standard fun-for-all-ages PowerPoint presentation. We look forward to bringing the results to the readers of this blog next week.
Till then, happy linkin’
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