SEO: Google Hateses Evil Fat Link Schemes
If you’re interested in SEO, a really good place to get a handle on what Google wants is by spending time at well… Google. Their Webmaster Central is chock full of information on everything from site construction to META tagging and you can find its homepage at:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/
And if you think you’ve already been, remember that things change. As Google bots get smarter and smarter, they’re looking for ways to stop manipulation of their results, and we can all understand that, of course. Nobody wants to type a search phrase into Google and have the first 10 results all pointing to the same page. It’s not good for Google and it’s not good for us — the searchers.
I don’t know about you, but I use Google at least 10 times a day and on most days, it’s more like 50. And for simple things like spelling, too. I know… There are better ways, but well, how convenient, right?
Anyway, there are things that Google absolutely abhors, and one of them is “linking schemes.” This wasn’t always the case. A few years ago, any link to your site was a good one whether or not you had one pointing back in the reciprocal manner. Didn’t make a hoot of difference. Then, Google decided they didn’t like “bad neighborhoods.” Those were places like porn sites, gambling sites, even free card sites or what they term “link farms,” which are nothing more than pages of links pointing to sites without a human editor to decide whether the sites are good or bad.
Today, there are many more reasons for Google to hate your links. continue reading »
