If the current indications
are correct we may be looking at the end of reciprocal
linking as a method of building rank and link popularity,
at least as far as Google is concerned.
The latest ‘Google Dance’,
nicknamed ‘Jagger’, has caused major concern by those
suffering loss of position on the top ranks of the search
engine’s listings. So we decided to take a close look
at what is happening and see what we could learn.
We have a few small websites
that have a limited number of links. These sites are
used mostly for research and testing of our primary
business in Web Analytics. By analyzing these sites,
we were able to quickly get an idea of what is happening
in Google’s Jagger Update, which is still in progress
at the time of this writing.
By using our web analytics
tools, we were able to look at the history of visits
by the bots and the links to these small sites. We had
to go back as far as January in order to build a picture
of Google’s actions. Our software also allows us to
look at all links from the SEs, not just those shown
by using the browser’s ‘link:’ command. G only reports
some of the links to your site, not all.
Here is what we have seen:
Like many other sites, we
noticed a sharp drop in rank in our test sites around
the first of July. They lost about 40% of their previous
link popularity and moved down sharply in rank. Also,
duplicate links on a single site disappeared. We now
only showed one link from each linking site.
As Jagger started, unlike
many others we have seen complain about G’s actions
and timing, our sites stayed rather stable. Evidently
they had already suffered their major losses. However,
there was a small increase in the number of links. This
caught our attention. We had expected that, like many
others, we would experience further disruptions to our
link structure.
But when we examined these
links, we were surprised to see that not one of them
had been listed with Google a few weeks earlier. Not
one. Our research showed that these links had been live
in G’s archive, but none had shown up publicly before
now. It appeared that there was some sort of ‘aging’
process taking place, but this may just be coincidental.
It is more likely that older links disappeared because
the host site was lost in the shuffle and our links
no longer appeared ‘relevant’.
The other thing we noticed
was that not one of these new links was listed on our
reciprocal links pages. In other words, all reciprocal
links had vanished. We think that this is because G
is down-grading or eliminating reciprocal links as a
measure of popularity. This does make sense, actually.
Reciprocal links are a method of falsifying popularity.
Sort of a cheap method of buying a link, if you want
to think of it that way.
If your websites have suffered
from the latest ‘dance’, you may want to take a look
at the type and source of your links. If they are mostly
from link exchanges, you are probably looking at the
reason for your move down the list on the search engines.
During the second week of
the Jagger Update, a few of our reciprocal links did
come back up. However, we also noticed that these were
from places where we had highly relevant content. They
came from articles where we discussed our area of expertise:
Web Analytics, or from forums where we had relevant
threads. So we feel that these links came back because
of content, not linking.
The other group that came
back up was one-way inbound text links, regardless of
the originating website. These links also had strong
relevance to our web analytics business. In other words,
they contained keywords and/or phrases related to our
site and its business.
This research has us now
re-evaluating our linking strategy. We urge others to
do the same.
We are now concentrating
only on building strong one-way inbound links. We are
focusing on publicity, articles, directories, and other
direct methods of building our image and consumer awareness.
In addition, we are also
looking for associated but non competing firms like
web developers, Search Engine Marketers, SEOs, website
owners and designers to partner with us to build direct
business relationships and the resulting inbound links.
This strategy may not be the fastest method of building
links, but we feel it is rock solid and within the spirit
of good business practices. The best thing is that it
is search engine independent.
We will no longer worry about
chasing (or beating) the search engines and their ever
changing algorithms. That is a fool’s game we are sure
to lose.
Instead, we will focus on
building rock solid links and popularity with the group
that counts: our customers. By focusing on beating our
competition and providing a top quality product, plenty
of educational information and relevant content, we
are sure to move up and stay at the top of the search
engine rankings.
It’s something to think about.
About
the author: Will Moore is a web analytics specialist
with over 20 years of hardware, software and web development
experience. He has sat on the ANSII and ISO standards
committees, been a speaker at major technical conferences
in the US, Europe, China and Singapore and has written
numerous articles on various technical subjects. Visit
Web
Stats Gold for more articles and information on
web analytics. You may contact him at will@webstatsgold.com |
