Has Google finally killed off linksales??
Hey folks,
well the dust is starting to settle after this weeks Q1 2008 TBPR update, (see my previous blog entry) and I am starting to wonder whether google has finally dealt a fatal blow to the online link sales industry.
A Little history lesson, back in the old days of SEO, the onsite content, keywords, META tags and so on were all you had to worry about. That meant that you could get any site of any age to the number one position, by making sure you had the correct ratio of words to keywords. This is back in the day when it was DEC’s Altavista that ruled the search engine competition, and Lycos was second and Yahoo were just starting up (this is a long time ago by internet standards!).
When google appeared on the scene, they made it so that the on site SEO was only 20% of the equation, and the off site SEO was about 70%, and this entailed having lots of links back to your site. Google counted each link as a “vote” for your website. This created a massive industry of people selling links on their websites to other webmasters to promote their own websites search engine ranking positions, as opposed to buying traffic by way of link advertising.
Google has long made it clear that they disaprove of this practice and have started looking at ways to crack down on this practice, and it would appear that on this latest update to the toolbar pagerank ratings, that they might just have done that. What remains to be seen over then next few weeks and months is whether the current pagerank levels are just an interim update, or if this is it, and we have an all new pagerank algorithm.
If that is the case then all SEO’s the world over will have a lot of learning to redo!
Anyway, off for my coffee!
MM