The battle for top ranking the major search engines, is one
that’s ongoing on a daily basis with a top Google
ranking being the number one target.
There are whole business models build out of getting a top
ranking in Google and to a smaller extend, the other major
search engines.
You could say Google has unknowingly created billions in
business turnover, from others trying to outwit them.
In the battle of getting rankings which has turned to the
power of links, has launched full services around this
concept. Its not new just more obvious now especially due
to the explosion of blogging.
Some of theses services buy and sell text links. In the
same way ebay does, it’s a matter of bringing
together buyers and sellers. Now link pricing has be set in
several ways: a single purchase cost using services like
payperpost.com and reviewme.com blog post services, or a
pay per month option which is used by other services such
as text link brokers and many other providers.
Now most of the pricing is based on Page Rank of the pages
the links are on. Recently Google updated its page rank and
many sites took a major nosedive. Now we are talking about
the dropping of a PR 10 down to a PR 6 which happened to a
site called statcounter.
Statcounter.com is a free web based statistics program
which allows you get good statistics on traffic for your
website.
The best feature is being able to hide any display of its
counter on your page. I recently found out that even if the
counter display is hidden- it still creates focused text
links back to its home page (that’s another whole
story)
Now some quick research into statcounter after the PR drop-
they still rank for over 500 different competitive 2 and 3
word keywords. So the PR drop would have no effect on
traffic at all. They do sell text links and this has been
suggested as a reason for the drop in page rank (to
discourage this action)
The dropping of PR is most likely just an adjustment of its
numbers- it’s happened before and will probably
happen again- and quote a well known SEO company:
“My guess is that the toolbar PR penalty is just that
-- a lowering of visible PR in order to make a
statement”
If sites keep rising in PR then it has no value. So
it’s like a re-valuing of a dollar under inflation.
If you are not selling text links, it won’t really
effect you. This fits together with Googles recent
statements about the selling of text links as they do not
approve if they are purchased for the sole purpose of
influencing search results (which most if not all are)
Google has come out an said that no follow tags should be
placed on these links and also asked for webmasters to
report sites that are selling links. This tells me that
they are getting desperate to stop “the purchase
links for rank” sites.
So is buying links a good thing or not?. Well Google is
against it, however if its done correctly and not abused
like some have, it’s a win-win for blog owners and
business owners.
Like most SEO it should not be the only method of getting
links, however it could be used well by those with
reasonable budget and long term business plan. I
don’t pass judgement on whether I agree or disagree
whether it is the “right” thing to do. The
type of links and how to buy is a whole other
article……
----------------------------------------------------
Paul Easton is a self confessed online marketing nut- who
helps from an "in the trenches, doing it" point of view.
Search engines and linking for long term traffic a
speciality. Working out of New Zealand, he focuses on Niche
US markets. Get a Plan for free web Traffic here:
http://www.SEOTrainingLive.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment