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Safe Links In Spider Food Chains: Technical Recommendations for Natural Linking

When Yahoo and MSN are not making themselves clear on this issue, Google is crusading against webmasters paying for and getting revenue from links. According to Google’s reasoning, “Our goal is to provide users the best search experience by presenting equitable and accurate results.” That said, if the link is paid, it might have been received from an irrelevant website, and so it was created with the only purpose of passing Page Rank for the target site’s higher position in search results. Consequently, Google users will be dissatisfied with the irrelevant sites’ artificially inflated positions in search results (this also violates Google’s webmaster guidelines).

What Google Recommends

Google allows ad publishers to flag their paid links with the “rel=nofollow” tag or use other techniques that prevent paid links from passing Google’s PageRank, such as protecting the page with the ad links from indexing in robots.txt file.

What criteria you should follow to select link partners? Pay close attention to the following factors:

• Sites linking to yours should be relevant; this way they will attract visitors and deliver traffic, and not just pass Page Rank. All of neighboring links on the page linking to your site should be relevant to your topic (the fewer links on the page, the better).
• If you exchange more than one link, ask your link partner to vary link anchor text. If the same text for all links is used, this will only show Google your target keyword, and reflects a lack of consideration for visitors.
• Avoid site wide links (i.e. links that go from every page of another site to yours). It looks unnatural, because it’s unlikely that someone would link to you in this way unless you paid for it.
• Search engines detect sites containing information on how to buy/sell links. It is a flag, so don’t exchange links with such sites.
• Search engines easily detect such words as “Advertisement”, “Sponsors”, and “Our Partners”, so carefully read the page where the link to your site is placed. Search engines also may figure out the location of your link (for instance, if it’s in a footer or side column) and consider these links paid.
• At last, your site can be reported to Google as a one that is paying for links. It’s hard to protect yourself from others in this case, so just try to be friendly :-)

Google uses most of these flags not to penalize sites automatically, but as indicators that sites are suspicious and require further investigation.

What can Google do?

“Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.” (c) Google Webmaster Central.

Google’s goal is to prevent a paid link from passing PageRank. The first thing Google can do is to discount a paid link, i.e. lower or even remove its PageRank from a site that sells links. The last resort is to remove a violator from the index; this is done only if Google is completely sure that the website is buying or selling links.

What if your site has been penalized?

According to Google’s webmaster guidelines: “The site owner can address the violations of the webmaster guidelines and submit a reconsideration request in Google’s Webmaster Central console. Before doing a reconsideration request, please make sure that all sold links either do not pass PageRank or are removed.”

Take care of your links!

Web CEO Metrics

Here we are sharing the generalized numbers from our HitLens Web Analytics service. It covers 300,000+ websites from all over the world.

Global Search Engines (%)

This chart gives the idea of the market share of each of the three major search engines.

Google and Yahoo are keeping their positions, while MSN has gained one point as compared to the year 2008.

Visitor Referrers (%)

You can see how visitors are being referred to websites. The shares of search engines and bookmarking have noticeably grown as compared to 2008. E-marketers spend less on paid advertising this year as compared to the previous one.

What Experts Say:

What matters is that there is an html link and if it’s paid, it would have either been opened as a JavaScript pop up window (so it would not be crawled by robots because they don’t pop windows) or use rel=”nofollow” to at least indicate to robots (Google especially) that that link is not to be crawled (not to pass PR).

Matt Cutts,
Google