Outbound Links Matter: Google's Recent Paid Link War

DaveN offers his recovery plan for a recent Google algorithm which has affected the rankings of many sites engaged in buying and selling links.

Key points from Dave's post and comments:

  • DaveN focuses on the importance of building topical and trusted links before reaching into the outlier parts of the web. Older and more trusted sites can then loop back to buying lower quality links to shore up their rankings for important keywords.

  • Links from high quality trusted blogs are a more effective way to buy / build links than links that have obvious footprints associated with being bought in a group of other links.
  • Dave also noted that in the past people who bought links may have got hit, and link sellers might have got their outbound link passing ability blocked, but this is the first time Google actively lowered the rankings of link sellers.
Published: May 16, 2007 by Aaron Wall in seo tips

Comments

find insurance
May 24, 2007 - 11:29pm

MoneySupermarket banned for paid links? Not for long eh? They must be laughing! At you.

Jeremy Luebke
May 17, 2007 - 1:51am

"Google algorithm which has affected the rankings of many sites engaged in buying and selling links."

Sorry but I personally oversee many sites who buy butt loads of links as do the people who I work with and not a single one of us has seen anything like this. And I know that I had at least one site get passed by a competitor that moved up due to TLA links so I know our links aren't the only ones still good. I think people are using the recent link brouhaha as a knee jerk reaction for rankings drops.

May 17, 2007 - 4:35am

I spoke with another friend who also saw nothing. Normally DaveN is spot on with the stuff he says. I will ping him.

Insurance Blog
May 17, 2007 - 1:53pm

The [car insurance] keyphrase has seen a huge drop for Moneysupermarket.com. They were caught buying hidden links on the Financial Times a few years ago. Google has found out that they are up to their old tricks!

Moneysupermarket banned from Google

Jeremy Luebke
May 17, 2007 - 4:50pm

.co.uk Google is using different spam filters and algos.

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