This article was published on Apr 12th, 2012
If you have used search engine optimization and back link building in order to improve your SERPs (search engine results page), then to say that this past month has been anything but crazy in the world of Internet Marketing is an understatement.
In past articles I have been talking about Google’s Over Optimization Penalty and the effect it has had (and is still having!) on anyone who has been using Search Engine Optimization to garner “favor” with the search engines, and in particular with Google.
As the dusts is starting to settle, and internet marketers slowly get up from their recent slumber, yet again a new reality has just hit the fan, and this one could have even more serious implications as to any future strategy.
After all, over optimization (which Google has recently decided to tackle) is a “lesser culprit” so to speak since it is easy to remedy. But the steady building of backlinks to improve the relevance of a page which had been part and parcel of any SEO strategy is yet another area in which the search engine giant has turned its attention to, in an effort to regain control of its search engine.
It all started when the measure by which a search engine would rank a website (based on keywords density and online seo) was altered when Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google founders) expanded on the concept of keyword density and introduced the concept of Page Rank.
The idea was that important pages or websites would be those with the most important number of links leading to them. In other words, if your site had 5 incoming links coming to it, and your competitor only 4, then your site would more likely feature higher in the search engine (all things considered) than your competitor’s because each incoming link would be considered to be like a vote from one site to another. The beauty of this concept was that the determination of search engine relevance would be made by websites, which themselves were leaders in their own industry.
In terms of internet marketing, it was a Eureka moment because for once, internet marketers felt that the ranking of their own sites no longer depended solely on Google, but on other websites, if only they could find a way to get as many sites to link back to their own.
A monster was created. First we had farm links where links could be purchased and this method worked for a while until the folks sitting at their google desks wised up to this and introduced methods to combat just that.
Then eZines were introduced where a webmaster was able to post an article pointing to his/her own site, and provided this article did not infringe on the terms of that particular ezine, said article, after manual review would then be made public and bingo yet another incoming link. This worked too, until of course people started to abuse the system and posted thousands of articles with the sole purpose of linking back to their own site.
The Panda upgrade took care of that one, as a number of eZines, including the biggest one (EzineArticle) had hundreds to their pages de-indexed overnight.
Around the same time, blog networks were created with the sole purpose of allowing internet marketers to automatically post articles (spun articles) in an ever increasing number of blogs becoming part of the networks everyday. Some of these blogs became a repository of poorly written and badly spun articles with little to no value to any reader.
These blog networks made it it possible for enterprising webmaster to write an article, spin it to dozens (sometimes hundreds) of other articles, all with keywords linking to their own websites. In a few days, a new site (sometimes just a few pages deep) could receive hundreds (if not thousands) of incoming links, making that site relevant in a short period of time, a feast which then made it possible for this small and new site to “dominate” the search engines!
This practice allowed many people to make lots of money on the back of the back linking theory, often times at the expense of webmaster who had been trying to increase the relevance of their own website by writing quality articles offering unique and interesting content to their readers.
Google just recently put an end to that and blog networks have been de-indexed throughout. Once such network is Built My Rank which has one of the most popular network and which, through the abuse of some of its members, became yet another repository of bad content.
The good news is that if you are one of those responsible and conscientious webmasters, always trying to provide good content to your readers by writing unique and quality articles, then all of a sudden you are no longer competing with volume link builders who were once able to out rank anyone in a matter of days, but with equally conscientious webmasters who also try to only provide quality articles to their own readers.
The bad news, is that this concept of volume linking has (in my mind) put to rest the theory that it was not possible for an unscrupulous competitor to put your site out of business by adopting an “untoward” attitude and say get your own site penalized by creating poor articles with links to your site and posting these articles in bad neighborhoods. In my opinion, this debate is now over, and I can quite imagine circumstances where your might one day become the subject of the google de-indexing chop just because some idiot (I am being kind) has decided to do to you the very things that Google wants to weed out!
It’s my opinion, and of course, I welcome yours!