Lesson Number One when building traffic to your website: follow Google’s rules.
Lesson Number Two and a follow on of Rule Number One: Don’t play the link farm game.
The story is from Search Engine Journal where Loren reports that Link Vault has been banned from the Google index, and thus, all the link exchanges that they facilitated. This is a very important development for those of us who practice sound search engine optimization policies and practices.
You’ll notice at Technosailor that there are a number of things that I don’t do that many other websites DO do. For one, I don’t have a blogroll. This is because I believe in filtering the wealth of information I come across and find out what I think is important for my blog and my readers. Instead of a blogroll, I link to other people in the context of posts. This is important because it provides the best possible context for my links without appearing to be haphazardly sending links across the internet.
You might ask why having a blogroll is, in my opinion, “haphazardly sending links” and why this is necessarily bad. Really, it comes down to how Google and Yahoo and other search engines determine the importance of sites. An “important” site having a high pagerank delivers more “weight” to a website or blog than a less “important” site would, thus changing how the search engines deliver results and provide relevance to the search context. In other words, a link from CNN outweighs a link from a low-traffic blog. Having a blogroll, dissipates the effect of this “weighting” making it more irrelevant if Google doesn’t step in and normalize their results. (Added: Blogrolls do not necessarily mean getting penalized by search engines. I’m just noting it as “something” that I avoid.)
Secondly, you’ll notice that I don’t participate in link-exchanges. I get emails all the time asking for link exchanges where I’ll post a link for someone in exchange for a link back to me on their site. This is “hamming” the system and it also reduces the quality of search engine results. If Steve Rubel approached me about a link exchange (which he won’t and has no incentive to do), I would turn him down.
Or would I?
There is an exception to the link exchange rule because, in the context of Steve Rubel, there is relevance to this blog. This blog talks about the same types of things (sometimes) that Rubel does and vica versa. However, if Steve Pavlina wanted to link exchange (which he won’t and has no incentive to do), I would turn him down. Even though he has a huge site with huge influence that would really beenfit me, my pagerank and my bottom line. He blogs about lifestyles and productivity, time management, etc. Nothing to do with this blog. I could take his link and link back to him, but the relevance is diminished.
The story of Link-Vault being banned makes me happy. No one should just haphazardly send links around the internet. I don’t see any justification for it. Ever.
Stumble it!
About the Author: Aaron Brazell is the lead editor of Technosailor.com and a social media expert. His passion is to see companies and individuals use the internet and web technologies wisely and effectively to promote their brands and companies. He is Business Development Manager for Lijit and he worked as Director of Technology at b5media from 2005-2008 and is currently an independent consultant.
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That said, the list I have is short by comparison and I don't feel it's needlessly tossing out links to other sites.
Your article makes a VERY valid point however that link overkill is too much of a good thing.
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My blogroll is like my magazine rack in the house. I cull through that once a month, too, and the "keepers" are indexed in magazine holders on the bookshelf.
Yes I am a bit anal about my reading material. :-)
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There is such a thing as too much. I think that a mile long list of links is one of them.
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