SEO News Blog

Once again I’m starting with this so boring but really frustrating topic on Google vs Link Buying, but I don’t think I have any other choice since that mess got totally out of hand.

Two days ago G’s manual link selling/buying “zealots” made the second massive wave of PR DownGrades see here for a good list in which most pr5 to 9 websites received pr3 to 5 as punishment. This big hit to the webmaster community felt really painful to everyone especially after the fact that in the first wave most big web directories including the DMOZ got their DownGrade for link sales and that really confused all of us since those directories seemed to be “reliable” and strong with good quality measurements for paid review/inclusion.

Anyway, things are getting messy not only from G but also with Yahoo as they recently upgraded their link spam algo to fight wordpress sponsors and this resulted into massive backlink decrease (some websites lost about 66% of their backlinks). Fortunately we didn’t have any website that had sponsored themes and we didn’t find any changes in both traffic or backlinks as many others did.

What is the new link strategy ?

That’s the SEO question of the day (maybe for Q4 of 2007) as most popular search engine manipulation strategies are out of date. Unfortunately I’ll have to underline that this “war” will only result in massive amount of “gray hat websites” that will abuse some little holes in the SE algorithms to gain good ranking. Actually those punishments on the large players are in a way benefit for smaller websites that never had the chance to hit the top, and now those sites are going to rank like never before and gain tons of good quality traffic so keep working on your content and hit the wave while you can!