It reiterates the importance Google places on incoming links, so let me repeat again, if you want to go after a competitive keyword term then you better have a lot of high quality links. For help on link building visit our link building packages.

Enough talk, go and read the article.

So, not to be left out in the cold, the key factors for number one websites in Bing seem to be:

• having an old domain name
• having quality inbound links, specifically from pages that have the same keywords in the title
• then the usual good amount of quality content (I’ve read Bing likes more than 300 words on a page), clean code and a sitemap

If you’ve done a good job of optimising your site for Google then your rankings shouldn’t be too different for Bing. If you’ve got loads of spammy links holding your website up in Google then these won’t help you in Bing. Bing seems to like better qualified links than Google – it’s about time!

Read more over at Bing

It smelt like a Google penalty, in particular a -50 penalty. But I didn’t understand, we hadn’t purchased any links, all of the links we obtained were on topic, relevant, using a range of anchor text. So I went to the source to see the outcome. Googling the clients URL I discovered they had over 600 links, amazing since we’ve only created about 60 for them, six months ago they had about 70, so something odd was going on. Close inspection of the sites linking to them revealed a heap, I’d be guessing at least 500 sites, were other Australian businesses with links pages.

And then it twigged. I’d remembered the client was involved in the Traffic Accelerator Program last year. They hadn’t created a links page themself, but every month they were emailed a list of websites to link to, including the anchor text and description.  So presumably, all the other companies involved in the program had also been emailed my clients details and asked to add them to their links pages.

That means about 500 sites are linking to my client with exactly the same anchor text and description. Clearly Google doesn’t like that, so they’ve updated the algorithm.

These pages are spammy, but more importantly they are just not useful – they add no value for anyone! The title on the pages is either links, resources, useful links, useful websites, or some other red flag that says to Google “I am spam” or something to that effect. They link to other websites that are completely unrelated to each other and provide no value to the user whatsoever. If you Google the URL of any of the sites in the Netregistry Traffic Accelerator video you will see the what I mean. Obviously for the companies that appear in the video their sites are strong enough to take take the penalty, which indicates they have a number of links that outweigh the spammy links, but for most in the program, these links would be all they had.

I’ve always maintained links pages and reciprocal linking are a waste of time. Now it seems they are detrimental.

From Google:

“In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.”

We do recommend you carry out SEO on your website before engaging in link building as the end result will be much better. Prices start at $AU450 per month. Click here to order now.

It sounds not particularly automated and more of a manual manipulation of search engine results. It’s not a good sign for small businesses or new businesses without heavy branding.

Read the article here.

What do these mean for the future of search engine optimisers? Well, it seems Google is finally yielding to the fact they can’t create the perfect algorithm, they still need human input. Whilst there is no official line the promote or remove buttons will have any effect on a website, it’s only a matter of time before Google use the data and the SERPs will start to produce results based on promote and remove.

And why not. It will encourage businesses and website owners to create useful content, and hopefully banish spammy sites to the black hole. Just think about all the crap websites you currently have to sift through that just happen to be good at SEO, but provide no real value, this is a way to reduce them.

Will the system be gamed? Of course we’ve already heard the urban myth of SEO agencies outsourcing to China and having lots of people search for and click on their websites across internet cafes, so you’d assume this would be the next step. Except they’ll each have to have their own Google account, no big drama, but the different accounts would need to register a different promote and remove vote from different IP addresses, meaning one person would need to login to one account, promote or remove, then go to another internet cafe, login to another Google account, perform another promote or remove and so forth – not time effective at all. I’m sure if a heap of different accounts were promoting and removing the same websites from the same IP address Google would notice (at least I hope they would!). Or I guess you could have a range of IP addresses and move around from computer to computer for different accounts – not an easy setup and I’m actually imagining it would seem a bit futuristic sci-fi. It would be cheaper to just create some decent content…I can’t imagine it would be worth the investment for the outcome.

So, fingers crossed for Google working the promote and remove feature in their search engine results.

It really is SEO 101, but it’s a great lesson to new website owners that there is no substitute for a quality website when it comes to chasing a high search engine position.

Download the Search Engine Optimisation Starter Guide here.