The other day we covered a topic on hold Bing's Duane Forrester has a bold statement that you shouldn't know where your links are coming from and honestly, I think it is awesome advice but people may take it to mean, if you do, it may lead to a penalty.
Anyway, today, I wanted to document how Google's Matt Cutts thinks about links today versus how Bing's Duane Forrester thinks about links today.
Bing said in that blog post:
While important as a vote of confidence for the content they point to, there is simply so much link spam these days that it’s tough to know where to turn.
This implies that links are so so spammy that Bing has to look for other metrics to determine confidence in a site. He is implying that links as a ranking factor is becoming less and less important, even so much as in today's rankings.
Of course, that may be entirely not true and my interpretation of what Duane wrote can be wrong.
Google said in a recent video that links still "have many years left in them." That in the next years or so, they are not going anywhere. He did say Google is working on ways to rely less on links but that is not coming for a while.
Here is that video:
So we have two search engine reps, one from Google and one from Bing. One says that links matter big time now still and will for some years to come. The other implies that maybe even today, links matter a lot less than they did.
Truth is, both probably rely on links the same. Maybe Bing likes spammy links even more than Google. But they are both giving the same advice about links, do it naturally.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Image credit to SEO Japan
