And Now A Word From Our Link Sponsor.

By way of SeoBuzzBox today I read through a post on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog titled "Building link-based popularity" by Stefanie Ulrike Dürr. It's nothing new but here's a couple of interesting things she said:

"This confusion lies in the common belief that there are two ways for optimizing the link-based popularity of your website: Either the meritocratic and long-term option of developing natural links or the risky and short-term option of non-earned backlinks via
link spamming tactics such as buying links. "

It's interesting to see Ms. Dürr draw a distinction between natural and paid links by suggesting one is better given its speed of acquisition. I can, via 'link bait', press release or some other content generation tactic secure a large number of links overnight and be a good website owner in Google's eyes. But let me pay another business for the privilege of hosting a link and all of a sudden I'm link spamming. It takes much more work on my part to buy quality space than drop an $80 press release.

So nowadays, undermining the PageRank algorithm is likely to result in the loss of the ability of link-selling sites to pass on reputation via links to other sites.

Bold is mine. I wonder how many links it would take to trip the alarm and make that sentence read: ‘undermining the PageRank algorithm will result in the loss…

Does the algo have to register 20 outbound links before it flags the site? 30? 40? I don’t know but it makes sense they'd look for sites with large numbers of outbound links on multiple pages. It's why I recommend you avoid buying site-wide links and stick to single text link ads on key pages within a site. Works for me.

Last one:

"Discounting non-earned links by search engines opened a new and wide field of tactics to build link-based popularity:"

Whew, I'm glad Google finally put the cashbah on recips and paid links or we'd still be linking like it's 2002. To be liberated from promotional and incentive linking into the advanced world of link bait, Digg and Yahoo! Answers is so gratifying..... Thanks Google!! xxoo

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