Hi,

I am not sure how your keywords SERPS are behaving but one im working on at mo have had a bit of a change around, mainly a lot of previously low ranked sites (with low pr) are appearing quite high and a few of my competitors have dissapeared

My initial observations are the sites that have had a lot of incoming links generated through a links directory have completely dissapeared.

All first page results have no "links" page. Do you reckon googles cracking down on link spam?

Google has been cracking down on link spam for quite some time now. The old practice of having 'links' pages with hundreds of links is something to avoid. In truth I don't think it was ever a good practice since it served little purpose for your site's visitors.

Also PR itself really isn't all that important. All other things being equal I'd prefer a link from the higher PR site, but it's relevant links that are important. A relevant link from a low PR site can be better than a non-relevant link for a high PR site.

It makes a lot of sense to add relevant links if you think about it. A relevant link will produce clicks regardless of whether or not it helps in a search engine.

Most of the top ranking sites on my KW's seem to have oneway links from unrelated sites but lots of them.

I wonder if there is a better way to get oneway links than sending out the classic "if you link site A to site B then i will give you a link from site C" which can be easily worked out and nerfed by the google algo (not sure if it does already but if not it will do one day soon)

wonder if there is a better way to get oneway links than sending out the classic "if you link site A to site B then i will give you a link from site C" which can be easily worked out and nerfed by the google algo (not sure if it does already but if not it will do one day soon)

From a programming view point these "three way schemes" are simpler to detect than a reciprocal scheme.

Is there a better way? course there is. Just have good, useful content and your site will get links quite naturally

when you say link spam, does that include links with relavent sites???

Link spam is any link done merely for a perceived SE benefit. If you get links from a visitor perspective you cannot be wrong, if the same links bring a SE benefit as well then it's a winner all ways round.

Who is to say what is "relevant"? Visitors to a site selling Land Rovers are also very likely to be interested in buying hiking boots or wellingtons.
SE algos cannot ascertain relevance in the way that a real person can, so all this talk about relevant links being better for SE ranking is simply speculative BS IMO!
Links from what the SE algos rate as authority pages are good for rankings however these are not always going to be relevant.

You're right Chris about humans being able to determine relevancy better than a search engine. I'm not sure that all the talk about relevant links is just speculative though.

I think search engines can still determine a certain amount of relevancy. For example I've recently added a resources section to my site (articles, blog, etc) and have AdSense on those pages. When I put up the first article Google was way off in the ads (the ads displayed were more based on one or two sentences rather than the entire article). The more pages I've added though the more the ads seem to be in line with the overall content in the section. I've even noticed that they're putting up some 'releavant' ads on pages where I stray off the topic.

I agree with you that search engines aren't likely to make the connection between hiking boots and Land Rovers, but I think they might make the connection between a Land Rover and tire brands especially if the link is on a page where the tires used by a Land Rover is mentioned in the content of the page.

I also think that part of the concept in relevancy is in the anchor text to the link. Search engines should be able to see that if I have 'web development' as anchor text and the link takes them to a page about where 'web development' is mentioned several times on the page that the link is somehow relevant.

It's possible I'm thinking too much like a human in this. I'm pretty sure you've been at this longer than I have (actually I know you have - some of what I've learned about seo has come directly from your posts at this and other forums) and my programming skills aren't what I'd like them to be, but I don't think it's too far of a strecth for the search engines to be able to determine a certain level of relevancy.

And herbal even if a search engine can't determine that hiking boots would be a relevant link for a page on Land Rovers if I sold hiking boots I'd still value a link on that page. Human beings will still see the link and quite possibly click on it. Every link out there doesn't have to be for a search engine. It's still ok to market directly to people.

If your keyword is "holidays" and the page linking to you uses various instances of this keyword then this is a relevant link. If in turn pages link to that page using that keyword on the page IMO that could be considered a more relevant link and worth more.

So if i join a link exchanging directory like linkmarket.net and get about 200 relavent links and anchor text, would this be regarded as link spam??? (obviousley not getting all those link on the same day)

Yes and/or No, depends on why you are getting the links

though with any scheme the value of the links is likely to be a large round zero on all counts.

Originally Posted by chrishirst

Yes and/or No, depends on why you are getting the links

though with any scheme the value of the links is likely to be a large round zero on all counts.

how would SEs know why i'm getting the links?

They don't!

That's why some sites using linking schemes are blocked from passing linkpop/PR by Google or ignored by Yahoo (MSN haven't learned yet) because they only exist for SE reasons. So if you are getting links through any kind of scheme, be sure they will send useful targeted visitors otherwise you are likely to be wasting your time.

If you categorise your link pages and build your own html it is unlikely that SE will penalise you. It is a very bad idea to use fully automated link exchanges as these definately have a detrimental effect (ie the sites that say "get 35,000 links in 1 minute" and you have to d/l there code so a massive directory is added to your site, usually with advertising links hidden in there).

linkmarket.net is a good place to start trading. A lot of people on there have link pages with like 1000 links on same page but some people on there know what they are doing so you can get some nice links.

This method still works but for how long is my concern. Im trying to build a site that should be able to go one step further than link trade sites but with work commitments it could be months before its finished.