Links Companies

There is quite a bit of talk lately about Google and other search engines penalizing sites that use Links Companies to obtain or list links to your site.

Does anyone know the details of the actual facts here ? Obviously, no business wants to be banned by search engines for lack of understanding.

I can understand a product like "Zeus" possibly being a problem if you send unsolicited e-mail to websites asking for reciprocal links, but, what about companies like LinksManager.com ? They do not send e-mails to anyone, they leave it up to the owner of the website to do this. What they do is create a page for your website that lists links you find in an organized way. That seems to be harmless, or are the engines/directories thinking something else ?

Would both of these products/companies be on the problem list for Google etc. ?

Any advice is appreciated. Thank you.

Ken Black
http://www.golfrevelations.com

Hi Ken,

> There is quite a bit of talk lately about
> Google and other search engines penalizing
> sites that use Links Companies to obtain or
> list links to your site.

They may not be "penalizing" sites... just adding less weight to the lower quality of reciprocal links generated by these links companies.

> Does anyone know the details of the actual
> facts here ? Obviously, no business wants to
> be banned by search engines for lack of
> understanding.

Very true.

*snip*

What
> they do is create a page for your website
> that lists links you find in an organized
> way. That seems to be harmless, or are the
> engines/directories thinking something else
> ?

Scenario one:

John's website sells pooper-scoopers for Iguanas. He has toiled for countless hours. Researching other related sites, building relationships with the webmasters, gained respect and become known as one of the worlds most prominent Iguana pooper-scooper experts. The other site owners, because they respect John and value his opinions/information/products, have included a link back to his site. There are 50 links in all and John gets a small but steady stream of qualified visitors through the links as a result.

He also has the #1 position in the major engines under several search terms related to Iguanas and pooper-scoopers.

Scenario two:

John puts up a site on - you guessed it - pooper scoopers for Iguanas. He's looking for a quick fix for his low traffic problem so he joins a whole slew of links page programs because he heard that link popularity weighs heavily with the search engines. He sits back and waits for the #1 positions and the orders to flow in.

His link is included on about 11,452,909 pages of links. These pages include links to sites on everything from Asses (yes, I mean Donkeys) to Zookeeping. 99.9% of the links are unrelated to Iguanas or pooper-scoopers. No-one visits his site through the links, and he can't find his site in the major SE's. John wonders why he has no orders coming in.

In Scenario one, John's site is only linked to and from sites that are Relevant to his own in some way. Search Engines, and more importantly, the People who search for information in the engines are looking for Relevant info on the topic they are interested in.

Search Engines use what is known as an "algorythm". A process of determining the quality of relevancy of a website to what a person types into their search box. This algorythm is used to most acurately present the searcher with the highest quality of information possible.

If the search engines algorythm is now adding less weight to the quantity of links in the link popularity aspect of their algorythm, they know that the quality of information presented to the searcher has been in some way comprimised by the onslaught of linkspage companies.

Search engines are a business like any other. If the quality of their product (relevant information) is comprimised, they loose viewers. If they loose viewers, they loose ad impressions, and in turn loose money.

Changing their algorythms is just another form of Quality Control.

Hope this sheds some light for you.

Paul Short

Google rules, have you seen the linkspider?

Here's a post you might find interesting.

Paul


Google post (link spider)

Hi Paul,

That was a great post!

I agree, it does help to look at things from the search engine owners' point of view.... It helps to understand their mentality, and why they might make certain decisions. Like most people, they want to offer a quality product to their customers, and here their "customers" are the people who use the search engine (more so than those who list their web sites there)....

Ken, I also think a good way of getting noticed is probably to be unique in a memorable and positive way.... If you can achieve this, you might be able to stimulate "word of mouth" discussion and get people to mention your web site to others (and you may find others even linking to you)....

My first attempt at a commercial web site was Entrepreneur-Web, which I started in 1998.... It's a bit out of date now (I'm planning to update it), but I was pleasantly surprised by the "word of mouth" discussion that got around about Entrepreneur-Web. I aimed to create a very useful online resource. Where I tried to be unique was to be the most comprehensive list of online marketing forums around.... I found as more people came to know about Entrepreneur-Web, they told others too, and some even linked to it....

I think the importance of occupying a unique position in people's minds cannot be understated.... Most people DON'T do this, and I think it is why they are not as successful as they could be. It takes some thought to do it, and some work too, but if you succeed you could find people mentioning your site in surprising places. :)

- Dien Rice