Comments on Google Says ...: Who does Google trust now?

You surely possess deep insight in what you are ta...

2006-11-15T19:43:00.000-08:00

You surely possess deep insight in what you are talking about Mr. Michael Martinez.

Very informative your posts are.

I just blogged about your blog.

Thanks Mr. Michael Martinez

Hey Michael, someone just pointed me to this post....

2006-10-20T15:05:00.000-07:00

Hey Michael, someone just pointed me to this post. The idea that you want links from a diverse set of sources isn't new to either of us, is it? I can imagine a number of ways, including what's been published on TrustRank, to get the job done at the search engine. You could just as easily invent StinkRank, and propagate stench backwards through the inbound links pointing to crappy sites. :D It's not impossible to get to the concept of a neighborhood either.

Although we hear and see in practice that a Yahoo directory listing can help avoid that early-stage trust filtering (sandbox, whatever), shouldn't one ask what the mechanism behind this effect is? We know what is possible, we know what has been done in the past. The core concept of the PageRank algorithm can be applied in other areas. Perhaps some paid links are trusted (such as the Y! directory), because they imply that the website is legitimate... how many people will pay $299 to submit their 'traffic equalizer' site to Yahoo?

I agree Michael - there has and always will be peo...

2006-09-13T11:49:00.000-07:00

I agree Michael - there has and always will be people who are looking for the "quick buck" and the fastest way to get what they want. That's why fads happen. As you say - it a dilemma for professional SEOs - because less relevant sites rank higher due to 'promiscuous linking' - thus prompting everyone else to use the same techniques just to compete. But what can you do, really? It's like beating back the tide with a bucket.

Hi,First - I think we never met in person, but I a...

2006-09-12T01:40:00.000-07:00

Hi,

First - I think we never met in person, but I am following your research for 2 years now at least - and I remember you were the first to mention "link damping" functions back in 2004 ... way before I first read some of the SE research papers ...

Thanks for this great roundup... this post deserves the name "authority page" or say authority document... I cannot find anything missing in there.

Your view of hordes of people trying to exploit .edu and .gov is a good one and I must assume myself among those people ... altough I am not spamming guestbooks or any kind of other "broken" software... I think those outdated, spammable software installations as pointed out by Rand & co at seomoz will get banned or just neutralized from their effect.

Thanks again for this - a refreshing read!

presellpageman

I agree with you, but there are a lot of highly se...

2006-09-11T12:48:00.000-07:00

I agree with you, but there are a lot of highly selective Web sites that SEO link builders are finding ways to exploit. Look at the attention being paid to .edu and .gov domains right now.

You basically have thousands of link builders hacking ideas for obtaining links from those sites. I don't mean they are hacking the sites -- I just mean they are testing and probing the openness of the sites and finding domains where they can obtain links.

If enough people do that, they'll eventually dilute whatever quality value resides in those domain communities, or at least in some areas of those domain communities.

Eventually, people will start posting that ".edu links and .gov links no longer work (as well as they once did)".

In theory, it should be difficult for spammers to ...

2006-09-11T11:36:00.000-07:00

In theory, it should be difficult for spammers to exploit "trusted neighborhoods" for the simple fact that they *are* more exclusive neighbourhoods. Is the whitehouse website going to link to a gambling site? Probably not.

A link from a "trusted" website can give you a leg up to escaping the sandbox, but I won't generally pull you right out. Long-term effective SEO has never been about quantity - it has to be about quality.