google rankings: bye-bye link popularity …
January 7th, 2008
… hello real popularity.
From its inception, backlinks have been at the core of how Google ranks Web sites. With such knowledge, SEOs have been finding ways to manipulate rankings in a variety of ways - link farms, reciprocal links, directories, paid links, etc. Each new strategy has been met with a new algorithmic penalty or filter.
I think it’s an ongoing battle the search engine is sick of fighting.
As Google took on links in a big way in 2007, they’ve realized rankings have to rely on more than just one main criteria. No doubt backlinks will always be part of Google’s DNA. However, by diversifying the how, they make the SEO game much more challenging. And if they can makes results better, weed out pretenders and drive more people to AdWords in the process, well, that’s a good thing for them.
This week, I’ll be highlighting some - no, not all - of the most important new ranking fundamentals I see Google implementing in figuring out which Web sites and pages are really the most popular and trusted using a variety of data in addition to backlinks. Outlining these new criteria will help shape the direction of my own business and should be a filling snack for you search junkies out there.
January 7th, 2008 at 5:03 pm
Matt Cutts of Google gives some good guidelines on linking which sort of goes against your post here: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/015764.html
January 8th, 2008 at 4:25 pm
your post is not very accurate.. reciprocal linking is alive and well and works very well not only in terms of branding a website and generating quality traffic apart from SE returns, it also does improve search rankings when you link slow and steady with relevant sites. Even Google’s Matt Cutts recently stated at Pubcon that there is nothing wrong with reciprocal linking and that it happens naturally all the time.