Predicting what will happen in the SEO world is pretty much a question of guessing what the engineers and product developers at Google have been working on for the last few months. My predictions last year about the paid link war haven’t really come true so let’s see what happens in 2009.
Google is maturing fast so we can be sure that any changes are tested for a long time internally before being released for bucket testing externally.
The big news for 2008 was that Google didn’t do much in the way of penalising link buyers and sellers. PageRank penalties are purely scare tactics and I don’t know of a single site that has seen reduced traffic as a result of being penalised for link buying or selling.
We do know for a fact that Google has spent the last 12 months working on pattern matching algorithms to detect and devalue paid links. This means very little for link sellers because it doesn’t matter to them whether the links they sell pass weight or not.
It means quite a lot to link buyers and SEO companies because the link acquisition strategies that have worked in the past might not continue to work once Google perfects this algorithm.
Most of the blatant link buying we see in the UK comes from in-house SEO teams rather than SEO companies. These in house teams spring up because the company worked with an SEO company a few years back and realised all the SEO company was doing was buying links and decided they could buy links just as well in-house. These teams don’t keep up to date with the latest SEO trends and are wasting thousands of pounds a month buying useless links.
A big issue springing up in the last few months for Branded3 has been how to handle link acquisition for new clients. If Google is cleverly watching for link buying patterns then it’s important to be cautious when starting a link-acquisition campaign in case it trips a filter and causes the links to be devalued.
For example if Google spots a sudden burst of anchor text rich links springing up from a certain class of sites (blogs or directories for example) then they might devalue all the links in bulk rendering the entire campaign useless. However if the links were spread out over a few months with a lot of natural links built in then Google would never be able to detect a patter and the links would be highly valuable.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
{ 16 comments… read them below or add one }
Google gets better by the day so the best bet is natural links by building good content.
Welcome back from your break Patrick!
You can build good content all day long, but unless you market it, you’ll get nowhere.
This is when the PR department, solid customer relations, and syndication comes in. RSS feeds and Twitter work reasonably well too.
Content works, but it works much better when you promote it hard and already have a fan base!
Do you buy links for you clients? And if so do you make them aware of the risks beforehand or do you find that they are often at the stage where they dont care anyway?
Not a single site? I know of many sites that have been penalized for buying links and don’t even rank for their own names anymore.
I hope Google will give us best result and services in 2009
Noob question here, but whats a natrual link? Leads to the next question, what is not a natrual link?
Any idea on how many links per day would be just too many?
I tend to try to get around 2 or 3, but they all have the same anchor text, is this bad news?
Patrick,
I see a lot of anchor text bombing from your side to your home page.
With keyword SEO you are linking your home page. Is there any moving on ranking for that keyword because of that?
Hi Jeff a maximum of 3-5 link per day is enough because google will penalized ones site for a sudden boost . search for new key words that you can use, Everything should come naturally.
Jeff, Google it
In digitalpoint forums, many users said that there is something going on in Google Search Algorithm that devalues SEO.
I can only hope that google will keep rewarding those who deliver high value unique content…
I like the new rating system they have…
have you seen it?
the up or down arrow and the ability to comment…
that’s pretty sweeeeeet!
David King
I think it will affect the link sellers as well. They might be able to get away with selling links that provide no juice for a while, but soon enough it will catch up with them. No one will pay for links that do not help promote there site.
Why does google dominate serps and not MSN?
Why does MSN differ so much to google?
I had a site high on MSN and nowhere on google.
Can you explain why this is?
The debate continues whether SEO will die with all the changes that’s coming, but what’s more important is to keep providing valuable content on your websites and blogs. The more valuable content you provide, the more likely your website and/or blog will survive, even if SEO changes from what is today. Thanks for sharing this.
I sold links from a PR 6 site and a couple of months later, my Dmoz listing was taken off and my PR went really down and no links on Google. Perhaps Google don’t really penalise people for selling, but my thinking is a competitor told Google/Dmoz about me selling links and then banned my site for a couple of monthsn
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