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Besides, it seems to me that these "problems" are only really thought of as problems by the type of people who put "search engine" in the title of their blog.

Besides, it seems to me that these "problems" are only really thought of as problems by the type of people who put "search engine" in the title of their blog. Or anyone who runs an online business...? Let's say you're a small ecommerce site, your site is growing, your blog is gaining readership as it's become a great resource. One of your nasty competitors who doesn't like that your rankings are going up for all this hard work decides to hop on Fiverr and buy tons of terrible links all pointing at your site and your rankings all the sudden drastically drop because your site is now viewed as spam. That's a very realistic concern for a lot of webmasters and small business owners (the big guys suffer a lot less from negative SEO because their link portfolio is far more balanced out). I'd much rather have Google just give a ZERO value to low quality and shady links as opposed to a negative value.

mattezell 13y ago
"...hop on Fiverr and buy tons of terrible links all pointing at your site and your rankings all the sudden drastically drop because your site is now viewed as spam..." I saw this very thing happen in real life, actually... though it wasn't a competitor... A well meaning team member on a project which I was previously affiliated with decided "Hey, I know how we can get this project some exposure! FIVERR!"... Yes, I know that there are better, less shady, approaches to generating traction, but we will just blame inexperience and a temporary lapse in judgement for the expensive lesson in negative SEO... Long story short, weeks of organic link building and organic service/site promotion were completely obliterated within 72hrs of $20 worth of Fiverr backlink purchases... Needless to say, so far as I know, the team only uses 100% whitehat approaches for site and product promotions now...
- sharkweek 13y ago
  I know plenty of people who know just enough to be dangerous like that -- they know that links are the one of the main factors in rankings and then get tunnel vision in increasing linking domains. "Boy that 1000 links for $5 sure seems a lot more efficient than the slow, organic process of building up a resourceful, industry-relevant blog!"
- jacquesm 13y ago
  > weeks of organic link building There is no such thing as organic link building. It is either organic or you're building links.
  - mattezell 13y ago
    Orly? Thanks for the "correction"? I guess that I, along with countless others (http://goo.gl/W1P69 http://goo.gl/W1P69), have just been ignorantly using a fictional term that nicely summarizes the concept that we are trying to convey - i.e. "the building up of back-links via non-automated, traditional routes - such as those stemming from legitimate interations with other businesses and clients"... Thanks, pal.
    - jacquesm 13y ago
      I don't particularly care what you call it. Back-links that were placed at your behest are spam to me.
      - mattezell 13y ago
        Ah, I got you... So you were stating your personal opinion on back-links, rather than stating a factual observation about organic back-links being similar to unicorns... You're stance definitely makes more sense as an opinion - unlike factual statements, opinions afford space for both fact and fallacy (i.e. "it is either organic or you're building links.")... When stating things in a matter of fact manner ("...There is no such thing as organic link building..."), it tends to lead people to believe that you are debating the legitimacy of some point they've made... Thanks for clearing up the confusion...
        jacquesm 13y ago
        The confusion is in your head, but I doubt I'm going to dispel it. Google managed to improve over altavista because it used something that wasn't abused by spammers yet: links. As soon as spammers (like you) realized that they could game the system once again and reduce search to a game of who most effectively manages to spoil the soup by introducing untold billions of meaningless backlinks into the game page-rank's days were numbered. So now we're more or less back where we started. I personally don't think there is a metric that you could come up with that can't be gamed but it saddens me that the quality of the web is spoiled in such a crass way. Props to google for trying to combat it. I wish you much good luck at breaking some more windows.
bradleyjg 13y ago
I don't understand why the quality of the blog should have anything to do with the search results that link to the ecommerce site. Just because your site should show up in the ranking for "reset color scheme Samsung monitor" doesn't mean it should show up in the ranking for "buy samsung monitor". To the extent google is conflating the positive signals for the first with the second, that's a bug in their algorithm that should be fixed over time. When it is I certainly won't cry any tears for the people that exploited the bug all this time.
- sharkweek 13y ago
  I think the quality of the blog creates domain authority and brand trust, therefore your overall rankings should increase. It doesn't even have to be a blog; it can just be great evergreen content that presents itself resourcefully on your site. Specific (edit: off site, on site should remain important) anchor text should eventually and ideally be worthless, as then results won't be based around who got the most links that say "buy Samsung monitor" pointing at their site. I think that is a slow train coming though.

mattezell 13y ago

"...hop on Fiverr and buy tons of terrible links all pointing at your site and your rankings all the sudden drastically drop because your site is now viewed as spam..." I saw this very thing happen in real life, actually... though it wasn't a competitor... A well meaning team member on a project which I was previously affiliated with decided "Hey, I know how we can get this project some exposure! FIVERR!"... Yes, I know that there are better, less shady, approaches to generating traction, but we will just blame inexperience and a temporary lapse in judgement for the expensive lesson in negative SEO... Long story short, weeks of organic link building and organic service/site promotion were completely obliterated within 72hrs of $20 worth of Fiverr backlink purchases... Needless to say, so far as I know, the team only uses 100% whitehat approaches for site and product promotions now...

sharkweek 13y ago
I know plenty of people who know just enough to be dangerous like that -- they know that links are the one of the main factors in rankings and then get tunnel vision in increasing linking domains. "Boy that 1000 links for $5 sure seems a lot more efficient than the slow, organic process of building up a resourceful, industry-relevant blog!"
jacquesm 13y ago
> weeks of organic link building There is no such thing as organic link building. It is either organic or you're building links.
- mattezell 13y ago
  Orly? Thanks for the "correction"? I guess that I, along with countless others (http://goo.gl/W1P69 http://goo.gl/W1P69), have just been ignorantly using a fictional term that nicely summarizes the concept that we are trying to convey - i.e. "the building up of back-links via non-automated, traditional routes - such as those stemming from legitimate interations with other businesses and clients"... Thanks, pal.
  - jacquesm 13y ago
    I don't particularly care what you call it. Back-links that were placed at your behest are spam to me.
    - mattezell 13y ago
      Ah, I got you... So you were stating your personal opinion on back-links, rather than stating a factual observation about organic back-links being similar to unicorns... You're stance definitely makes more sense as an opinion - unlike factual statements, opinions afford space for both fact and fallacy (i.e. "it is either organic or you're building links.")... When stating things in a matter of fact manner ("...There is no such thing as organic link building..."), it tends to lead people to believe that you are debating the legitimacy of some point they've made... Thanks for clearing up the confusion...
      - jacquesm 13y ago
        The confusion is in your head, but I doubt I'm going to dispel it. Google managed to improve over altavista because it used something that wasn't abused by spammers yet: links. As soon as spammers (like you) realized that they could game the system once again and reduce search to a game of who most effectively manages to spoil the soup by introducing untold billions of meaningless backlinks into the game page-rank's days were numbered. So now we're more or less back where we started. I personally don't think there is a metric that you could come up with that can't be gamed but it saddens me that the quality of the web is spoiled in such a crass way. Props to google for trying to combat it. I wish you much good luck at breaking some more windows.

bradleyjg 13y ago

I don't understand why the quality of the blog should have anything to do with the search results that link to the ecommerce site. Just because your site should show up in the ranking for "reset color scheme Samsung monitor" doesn't mean it should show up in the ranking for "buy samsung monitor". To the extent google is conflating the positive signals for the first with the second, that's a bug in their algorithm that should be fixed over time. When it is I certainly won't cry any tears for the people that exploited the bug all this time.

sharkweek 13y ago
I think the quality of the blog creates domain authority and brand trust, therefore your overall rankings should increase. It doesn't even have to be a blog; it can just be great evergreen content that presents itself resourcefully on your site. Specific (edit: off site, on site should remain important) anchor text should eventually and ideally be worthless, as then results won't be based around who got the most links that say "buy Samsung monitor" pointing at their site. I think that is a slow train coming though.