Entries from June 2007 ↓

Don’t be EVIL

It’s a pretty impressive mission statement from the Big G.

Recently, the internet marketing community has picked up on SERP adjustments on a couple of high profile sites.

A few weeks ago, TextLinkAds having dominated the SERPs for ‘Text Link Ads’ can now only be found on the first page because of their Adwords campaign.

John Chow who was recently hit by Google for the phrase ‘Making money online’ was slapped again and now cannot even be found for his own name.

Are these two sites considered EVIL by Google? Are they in violation of moral principles? Improper conduct?

If so then what do they have in common for these recent punishments from the Almighty? It seems that they both have committed the sin of PAID LINKS.

John Chow is infamous for his ‘sell a blog review campaign’ on his blog and TextLinkAds … well they are the leading buy and sell text links marketplace. So Google’s finally made their move on anti paid links crusade you ask?

Well, I don’t think so … I think they have just made a move on their ‘Don’t be Evil’ crusade. Both TextLinkAds and John aren’t actually famous for buying links to artificially affect their SERPs and the severity of the punishment indicates this isn’t an algorithm change.

These 2 have been picked out and punished as an example to us mortals. John for so publicly ignoring the Big G’s commandments on selling links and TLAs …

for taking 50% of their clients income

…. Err… I mean facilitating the sin of paid links.

It will be interesting if these guys get their rankings back especially if they change their business models. I think John will probably revise his blog review service … publicly. After all, God tells us to be forgiving right?

Things again being pretty hectic here but I have finally go some time to post in between the emails and lunch .. hmm, skipped breakfast again…

I wanted to talk a bit on how you direct the juice from inbound links within your website. Let’s ignore the paid links thing for the now because I am bored to bits discussing this topic recently but basically you cannot control where links arrive to your site. It maybe your homepage, your category pages or a content page somewhere deep within your site (Actually this is usually the case).

You can control however, how to direct that juice (I will use PR after this point) within your site, whether it is from home to deep or deep to home and how spread out the PR gets.

Forums for example are notorious for splitting the PR into tiny pieces such as member pages, calendars, reply, new thread pages, etc. When working on your SEO, you need to consider this and the below points.

1. PR is not an average, its a sum of the PR value of all the incoming links - Internal and External.

2. In general if you dont think that having a link to a page would help your users at that location - Chances are you should lose it. Less links means more PR will be passed to pages that are important.

3. Linking structure needs to be well thought out to take advantage of passing PR to the pages you want more power to.

That’s all for now.