I haven't forgotten about my promise to write a post about how to
identify closing questions. It's a topic that's dear to my heart and I
look forward to writing it more than licking the turkey grease from my
gravy stained tie but today I wanted to post a short comment, (as I'm
so famous for doing), about the numerous posts speculating on how far
the penalty train for paid links is going to roll.
I caught this post at Seroundtable
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/015327.html about a poll going on
at digital pointless
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=555519 asking if
webmasters would care to alert Google of their indiscretions publicly.
Of course denials prevail.
My favorite posts of this nature, (I should
mention I suppose that while I have not read that particular thread,
I've read 2,527,315 just like it on 657,893 other seo blogs and forums.
give or take a few), are always the ones that start with, "I have never
bought or sold a link but ------ >insert generic bitch of your
choice here<.
I would like to start a poll of my own.
When every link on the web, without the no follow idiotstick attached,
becomes suspect, when every webmaster on the planet is scared to put a
direct link to anything because they are not clear what is is
reciprocal, excessive, paid for, traded, going to a bad neighborhood,
or my all -time favorite, natural looking, (for a slightly off-topic
rant on the natural looking thing, read down to the PS), where does
that leave page rank?
What becomes of the holy grail of algorithms when a distinctly MINORITY
percentage of websites have virgin outbound links. Does a no no follow
tag raise a red flag for a human spam assassin to give the old cyber
rectal examine of your site? Turn your java off and cough please.
If Google doesn't come up with intention rank to determine the
webmasters motivation for giving another site a vote, how many condoms
can one algo-penis wear before the taste of rubber is left in the
mouth of it's own creators?
So, my poll is:
Is the paid link war penalties going to back off before PR becomes a
joke or is on site optimization going to start playing a bigger role
in placement since PR has much less value than when it started out?
When page rank becomes so devalued and distorted through attempts to
control it, what will become the tour-de-force du jour in SEO?
on site manipulation? > now where did I put that tutorial on how to
stuff the meta keyword tag?< 600 meg web page with 187 characters of
visible text?
Off site manipulation? >what will you charge me to host a page about me? can you say content hosting?<
And of course the big question for internet marketers has to be, does
Google really care if the only links you can get on the web are either
in search results, (not bad if your search engine is getting over 50%
of all searches), or PPC?
quit playin with your food and get that spaghetti out of your nose!
Peace y'all
the SEO Guru
PS:
natural
looking links
that one always kills me. If you attempt to make something natural
"looking" it is not natural. Something natural does not require any
special attention, manipulation or attempts at influencing a third
party, (even if the third party you're trying to influence is not a
living entity, like a computer spider).
A true oxy-moron at work but an even bigger one is a "natural" no
follow tag. if it has a no follow tag that is NOT natural. Funny huh?
When so many are trying so hard to "look" natural the one thing MOST
unnatural is putting some kind of special tag into your source code to
tell a spider that what you said in your text you didn't REALLY mean to
say it that way.
somehow a machine has gotten the entire world thinking it is natural "
looking"
to say something to a human but do it the way the machine likes even
though it creates more work for you and the machine will never buy
anything from you.
Now THAT'S Marketing!