Punished for using text link brokers?

But if their inventory is kept secret…. how would google know?

That’s true, if it is truly secret then you should be ok.

I was thinking along the lines of text-link-ads.com, where I believe the inventory is publically accessible and thus likely known to Google

ifr you want to be on the safe site
dont use them

googles latest policy is ,they are extra alert on these things

(of course buying links from the prof is a different thing ” title=”” class=”bbcode_smiley” />

It’s quite likely that Google knows about, and discounts the value of paid-for links from a broker such as this.

I would very much doubt that they would actually penalise you though, you just won’t get much or any benefit from those links.

However my guess would be that MSN and Yahoo would not be so strict, and are quite likely to treat this as normal links.

owldeath, it is completely different. Ask yourself this question first…How would you go about buying 1,000 links today? From one of those companies that has 1,000 sites all designed nearly the same, maybe hosted on the same couple of servers, maybe they just all happen to be linking out to the same group of sites (whoever pays to be linked). Google absolutely can tell when something like this occurs (I know because it came out of their own mouths yesterday).

Now, to the Katrina example, everyone naturally setup links to organizations that were trying to help, probably millions of new links pointing to the Red Cross for example. Google will reward the Red Cross with Katrina related search results because of this, clearly understanding that they didn’t go out and pay everyone to link to them because every site is completely different in the eyes of the search engine.

The same would hold true for a brand new site that set themselves up to help Katrina victims and received a ton of links overnight. Google likes seeing a bunch of links to a site, they don’t like seeing clearly bogus links pointing to a site, and yes they can tell the difference.

As for buying links, it is perfectly acceptable to buy a few links here and there, Google even said they don’t have a problem with that. They have been pretty publicly stating not to buy links, but that gets mis-interpreted by some, what they seem to mean is stay away from link schemes, which has always been a part of their webmaster guidelines.

webber – does the google algorithm have a ‘in case of hurricane goto top of serps’ line? How is this any different from buying thousands of links overnight? Only a human can tell the sort of things you are talking about.

One of the problems IMO is that often we forget the real game at Google.

A Link is a VOTE from one site to other site.
Google is talking about VOTES no links.

Under this concept, for common sites is near to impossible to have the please of 100’s of sites in a short time , or to have links from high PR pages.

So using the concept of Vote is easy to have some order growing naturally etc.

Wow, a lot of good SEO talk here. I just got back from the SES conference in Chicago, so I’ll add in my additional comments…

What search engine algorithms are looking for are natural patterns of links to your site. If you go out and buy 1000 links to your site tonight, it doesn’t look natural to Google tomorrow. It won’t hurt your site, but it also won’t help. But, it’s not the amount of links, rather how you got those links that Google is looking at. Take for example a Katrina Relief website that gets posted right after the hurricane. A site like that probably got thousands of links overnight, but they were given from a wide variety of sites across all sorts of industries, domains, etc. That site will rocket to the top of the SERPs because the links occured naturally.

The trick for us as search marketers (oh, you thought you were a gambling affiliate?) is to create links to our site that occur in a natural sort of way, whether it is natural or not. That means a lot of hard work and time going out to find quality sites that will want to link to you for a variety of reasons. Maybe you wrote a good article, mayber your blackjack tips are so good that a site about a blackjack system wants to link with you, there could be a million reasons to potentially get links. Keep it on a natural course and everything will work out fine.

On the reciprocal linking issue. There is certainly value to reciprocal links, that is easy to prove. But, you still have to do it right. The best advice is this, are you linking to another site to benefit your users, or just trying to game the system? In the long run, links done for the right reasons will prevail.

Is there any point to relevant but reciprocal links of the same PR or is it just a waste of outgoing link?

What also plays a role here is:

How many reciprocal links are there? A small number with sites that rank well in the SERPS are most certainly useful IMO.

How old are they? If both sites have weathered the times, and the links have done so too, there is a good chance the links are honest recommendations.

Is the content of the sites complimentary? I think more so than slots linking to slots, a site that concentrates completely on slots can exchange links with a site that concentrates on BJ.

The bottom line is: Is the link actually useful and what you would really recommend to your visitors? The real reason for google’s scrutiny of links is the answer to this question. I have found that you never go wrong actually just doing what google would like to see in it’s serps, rather than outguessing the current algos.

Also, in that direction of thought, have you ever considered that google likes outgoing links to good sites that are not reciprocated at all? People always think about incoming links. If you look at major sites you will find many link out to sites they consider useful to their visitors without any type of reciprocation. Many blogs do extremely well for instance and do exactly that, just link to relevant items.

Google doesn’t reward people who outsmart the algos, that is always short lived success. IMO google rewards people who actually do what it wants them to do, and do it well.

The point was to demonstrate the difference in trust levels. If someone tells you about product XYZ and it would appear that they are not affiliated with the company, they do not advertise that company, and in fact they have nothing to gain from recommending the product, you will say “this is a genuine recommendation, it is given for no reason other than to be helpful”. That is the equivalent on a one-way link.

If you see an affiliate link, it may still be useful to you, but you know that the link exists for a reason other than to be helpful. That is similar to a reciprocal link. It may be relevant, it may be useful to the reader, but it was put there only to make each site more popular in the search engines. Google know that, so of course they will treat these links with less importance.

That is a simpified example, but it was meant only to demonstrate a point – that different styles of linking convey different levels of trust.

Well in 2002 everything was exactly as you described. The change to the value of reciprocal links is much more recent.

How recent I can’t say, I’ve not been doing this for nearly as long as you. All my testing has taken place in the last 6 months.

BTW, all I say relates to Google; MSN and Yahoo are much less strict, much less sophisticated (so far), and therefore I would think recriprocal links probably still work there just as well as ever before. But Google is much stricter.

Anyway, you’re right to say that we’ll never convince each other, so you keep doing your thing and I’ll do mine and hopefully we will both be successful ” title=”” class=”bbcode_smiley” />