Future Google Link Strategies

[HHI Golf Guy]

From http://forums.seochat.com/t59161/s.html

Matt Cutts at PubCom

Matt just did a Q&A for all of PubCon and then an Adhok .15 hours with about 100 of us asking questions. Lots of great info but some of what stood out to me:

1. He confirmed that Google is now actively identifying reciprical linking strategies, 3-way linking strategies and purchased links, both programatically and by human intervention. He did not say exactly how they were handled, but he made it clear that those links, once identified wh=ould not be very valuable. He specifically suggested that is was silly to think that Google does not keep track of sites selling links. He suggests that if you go down the road of buyng links, know that you will likely be buying something of little or no value.

2. He confirmed that humans manually went through every Jagger spam report and manually removed MANY spam sites.

3. He stated unequivically that Google does not and in fact cannot manually add or raise the ranking of a site by hand, but that they can and do manually penalize and/or remove sites for legal reasons or spam.

4. He stated that thinking Google won't notice 3-way linking as easily as reciprical linking is silly.

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So, what does this mean for your own linking strategies in the future? I feel a bit like Chicken Little yelling, "The sky is falling, the sky is falling!" but I will repeat the strategy that I have been harping on over the past year: Mini article link exchanges!

Write 3, 4, or 10 mini articles and trade those with other webmasters to develop your links. Also, look in to article submissions across the internet.

"But what about duplicate content penalties!" cried the skeptics. Remember, just because you write an article does not mean that you have to publish that article on your own web site.

I said it before and I'll say it again: There will come a time in the not too distant future when hundreds of thousands of web sites drop to the Google dungeons. All of these site will have relied upon poor linking strategies.

Don't let your SEO efforts be reactive to algorithm changes. Be proactive in your strategies. For over 2 years now everyone has known that links and anchor text are important with Google. So, if you were Google what steps would you take to cambat link spam? This is what I try to do, and I believe it's the reason why our sites have survived the Florida and Jagger updates.

[frobn]

"Write 3, 4, or 10 mini articles and trade those with other webmasters to develop your links. Also, look in to article submissions across the internet.

"But what about duplicate content penalties!" cried the skeptics. Remember, just because you write an article does not mean that you have to publish that article on your own web site.
I agree this is an excellent strategy and I will even go a step further. At present, as long as the you don't have duplicate content on your own site or on a site sharing your server, Google will not view it as duplicate content. I have ample evidence that this is the case. Please note: I said FOR NOW, I don't know what will happen in the future. Duplicate content on a site will show up first as as a 'supplemental result'. If you knowingly have duplicate content and that page is indexed as a supplemental result delete the page quickly and resubmit it to google so that it will be dropped.

[gemini]

I agree about the content exchange instead of just pure links - this is something I've been implementing into my directory by providing listing detail pages for their own custom content. This works great especially for very targeted traffic.
As for looking at it as linking strategy, I have a question - that's good if you have 10 versions of content or articles you exchange with your links and don't have on your site at the same time, but what do you think about value of the duplicate articles on the other sites? I mean your dup.content on other sites. You will happen to host someone else's articles and they might be duplicates as well - how is that gonna work especially if manualy reviews are involved from the SEs side? I'm not being skeptick, I just feel shortsighted here :o .

[HHI Golf Guy]

As for looking at it as linking strategy, I have a question - that's good if you have 10 versions of content or articles you exchange with your links and don't have on your site at the same time, but what do you think about value of the duplicate articles on the other sites? I mean your dup.content on other sites. You will happen to host someone else's articles and they might be duplicates as well - how is that gonna work especially if manualy reviews are involved from the SEs side? I'm not being skeptick, I just feel shortsighted here :o .

How many times does an AP news story show up on thousands of newspaper web sites each day? How many times does someone copy and paste an article in a forum like this? Are these sites ever penalized?

Truthfully, I think that duplicate content penalties are blown WAY out of proportion (especially now that Google handles the 302 redirects properly). Every time I have seen a duplicate content penalty it was for entire sites being copied or spoofed on different domain names.

There might be a chance that there is a filter in place that says after X amount of words that are duplicated from one site to another that the newer domain name needs to be checked or penalized. But that's why I have chosen to use mini-articles for link exchanging.

Let's say I get 3 real estate sites from Florida that exchange these articles. They probably won't be the same exact three as on any other agents web site. Plus, I also plan to break up state pages further. Let's say that over time I get 3 Florida sites that want to exchange mini-articles. Putting all six on one page is probably too much content. So I take the two mini articles involving Orlando real estate and put them on their own page, and the miscellaneous Florida agents on another page.

The one thing that I will need to keep an eye on is having too much content that is not related to the service area of my agents. This could dilute the overall city name + real estate theme and main KW phrase that I am targeting.

So, how will I combat this? The first is to make sure that there are plenty of content rich pages that tie in to my main theme. The second is to properly structure my web site using sub-directories and possibly sub-sub-directories. In my experience, the SE's have a decent "understanding" of sub-directories so they are not given the same weight as root directory pages. (In other words, they relate to the main topic but are not the main focus of the site).

I don't think that this strategy will work with sub-domains, as some SE's seem to treat sub-domains as separate domains.

Anyway, I have a few plans in the works over the next month or so that will hopefully make it easier for all of us to plan ahead for the upcoming changes to link values. I'll let everyone know when I am done.

[gemini]

Thank you very much for elaborating. I've been thinking about syndicated dup.content and how it benefits rather then being devalued. No, I'm not talking about penalties and pretty sure that Google won't penalize for reciprocal links, but they surely can devalue a lot of them. Everything goes down to advertisement principals, based on traffic and branding - creating ad type content linking to your site and placing it on a page that can drive some clicks through.

For a few past days I've been thinking about relocation network pages that would have 3 or 4 those mini articles as you described, including contact and mailing address info, areas served and services provided. Every small area can have exclusive or semi-exclusive representation.. I have some ideas on how that can be organized too.

If you feel like having outside participants in your next month project - you can PM me. I was trying to talk to Josh about this, but we haven't finished our dialog :) I'll see if I can get some quality sites to fullfil major areas.

[gemini]

Here is Barry Schwartz's (he is at PubCOn right now) post:

Google Knows Link Networks Well (http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002818.html)
I know, its like 6am here but I couldn't sleep since 4am, thinking about this one topic. Google knows about your linking networks, it knows about your traded links and even some of your paid links. During the Organic Site Reviews session yesterday, people were calling out sites they wanted to review. I attended the session because the panel seemed pretty interesting. On that panel included Matt Cutts. Now Matt had his laptop with him and you can see he was doing his own research behind his computer, on the URLs brought up on the screen. While the panelist was looking at site architecture and using Yahoo's Site Explorer to pick on the site links, Matt was using some of his own tools. And let me tell you, it was scary.

He was asking questions, why do you have links from this site. It shows that your part of this and that network. Why are you doing reciprocal linking with this and that group of people? I kept thinking to myself, why do these people keep calling out their sites when they know they did some unnatural link acquisitions? Or maybe they didn't know? Either way, Matt clearly explained that the links are not hurting the sites, they are however not helping it rank in Google. And if they are paid links or if you are spending your time or resources getting those unnatural links - then it may hurt you financially.

It was quiet impressive to see, but also maybe one of the big take aways from this conference. Of course, I knew this before hand. But I have never seen Matt or an other search representation show such a public display of "We know who you are, what you did and why you did it." So maybe this picture is appropriate. :)

[HHI Golf Guy]

Thanks for that info. Google is scary :eek:

[frobn]

Here is Barry Schwartz's (he is at PubCOn right now) post:

Google Knows Link Networks Well (http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002818.html)

Thank you.

...Matt clearly explained that the links are not hurting the sites, they are however not helping it rank in Google. And if they are paid links or if you are spending your time or resources getting those unnatural links - then it may hurt you financiallyHow many times and in how many ways does Google have to tell us that unnatural links do not help before we get it?

[gemini]

well, natural links are the ones that in the content - references; or advertisement.