August 25, 2008 Archives

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: August 25, 2008"

Back in the day when reciprocal linking was useful, some webmasters were trigger happy and aimed to link to everything that would link back, even if there was no relevancy from site to site. Over the past few years, many of those reciprocal links were not as reciprocal as they used to be, as other webmasters became savvier and realized there was likely no value in these links.

With this being the case, a webmaster has looked into his links and noted that it's probably about time that he should revamp his "directory" of links. Should he dump everyone (especially the irrelevant links) or just a few select individuals who aren't linking back and aren't relevant either?

Forum members at WebmasterWorld suggest to keep only the relevant links (and pages that actually exist) and inform all webmasters that these links are to be dropped. Additionally, you don't need to necessarily aim for a 100% reciprocal link ratio. Instead, it should be "somewhere between 30-80% [reciprocal link ratio] which shows the search engines you are linking for your end user and not necessarily for reciprocation."

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld forum member decided to experiment with his title tags and made some slight adjustments. Consequently, he noticed a 65% decrease in traffic.

Is this the end for him? It's possible, as one forum member says:

Unless you are a super trusted authority site (ie you can throw up a page on a long tail and rank Top 3 in an hour), then Google is very cranky about title changes lately.

The particular forum member advises against changing a lot of title tags at once, as this could be very dangerous. WebmasterWorld administrator Tedster has agreed with this and says that Google is also sensitive to other changes, including keywords in the alt element and links in the footer (at least if it's a relatively new site which was launched several months before).

In this case, forum members suspect that this could be an over-optimization penalty.

It's best to make some decisions slowly before you do anything that can put your site traffic and rankings at risk.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Patrick Altoft blogged a recent finding that Google seems to have changed its algorithm and placed less emphasis on anchor text (versus on-site optimization). His theory (which is purely from observations at this point) is that Google is altering the algorithm because anchor text is currently the ranking algorithm's biggest flaw. There are a variety of reasons for this but Patrick specifically notes that the "best" link (as deemed by Google) for anchor text may not be the most ideal one after all.

Forum members are overall interested in this discovery and related developments. Since it may help thwart spammers, this may be a good direction for the algorithm to be headed. However, it may be related to the number of backlinks from a single source, as one forum member says:

It is more likely that Google would reduce value of backlinks with the same anchor text that come from the same domain, ie having 1000 backlinks from one domain using same anchor text could be worse than having 2-3 backlinks from the same site.

On the other hand, it may be that Google is starting to be a lot more privy to semantic indexing and matching up similar keywords with other anchor text. However, it's debatable that this is the case if Google is trying to reduce emphasis on anchor text altogether -- which makes sense in many cases (including in the paid links scenario which the blog post did not touch upon).

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn and DigitalPoint Forums.

Just a few days ago, forum members across multiple forums started observing a new Google PageRank update. Forum members believe that Google is lifting PageRank penalties on sites that sold links, but I beg to differ.

It looks like a PR penalty lifting. At least this happened to one of my sites which sold links. No change on my white hat sites.

(Maybe that guy was just lucky.)

Others have confirmed that the PageRank penalty has been lifted, or so that's what they feel is the case. However, it's not necessarily the case that a penalty has been lifted as another forum member points out. However, everyone agrees for the most part that there are PageRank changes that have only come into effect in the past few days, though some are doubting that there is a PageRank update because it's just "too early."

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.