Link Building Blog, News and Articles - Textlinkbrokers.com/blog

Here’s a great list of web directories, ranked by a quality index.

Thanks for the question Neil,

I’m not sure if I would call it buzz, since it has been a hot topic now for a couple solid years, but this is really a great question.  First I think its important to realize that it is the search engines jobs to create relevant searches for its users.  In doing so they are constantly developing ways to better their algorithms.  This has been their goal from day 1.

It is also important to realize that as much as they would love to implement a thousand algorithms to due everything they desire, it is simply not possible due to limitations of processing power, DB managment issues, legacy algorithms, and the basic limitations of their developers and managers.  In other words, just because something is “great in concept” does’nt mean that it is “possible to implement”.

Many people believe that Google is directly attacking paid ads by:

- Using block analysis to determine location of links

- Searching for words such as “Sponsored Links”, “Advertisements”, etc..

- Looking for a bunch of unassociated links grouped in a tight area..

- Manually looking through link inventories to manually penalize paid ads on those sites...

I think people are making it much more complex then it needs to be.  While it is very possible that they are doing some or all of the above mentioned techniques, I think there are much easier ways for them to go about accomplishing their end goal.

This is a good point to talk about LINK PROFILES, and the corresponding trust given to sites that have “good” ones.

With Link Profiling, Google only needs to look at the kinds of sites that a website links too in order to determine whether any link on that site should be trusted, and thus be given more or less weight accordingly.

- If a website links out to tons of low quality, unrelevant, or “bad neighborhood” sites, then their link profile would suggest that those links should be given less weight.

- If a website only links out to quality, relevant sites, then it’s Link Profile would suggest that those links should be given more weight.

Now there is a more to link profiling then just outbound links (inbound links, link trends etc..) but, to me, the link profiling concept is one that is much easier to control, then trying to create a bunch of new and complex algorithms that determine link location, number of outbounds in a specific area, etc. etc.. While I do believe that they do a little bit of direct filtering of paid links, I think it is a much smaller part then most people think.

My personal belief is that Google could care less if a link is paid or not, as long as the site providing it has a "trusted profile".

With that being said, as link builders, it is our job to build links under the assumption that Google is doing everything to devalue paid links as they possibly can, including all the things that the masses believe they are doing.  Being a demand driven company we are somewhat at the mercy of our clients beliefs in what links “work”.  Be it so, we still create programs that are much more advanced then what our clients are demanding.  Our Hosted Marketing Pages are a good example of that.  They are the “perfect link” in my eyes, yet it has taken well over a year for the market to catch up to the idea.

In addition, we feel it is our Job at Textlinkbrokers to do some of the manual work to filter out sites that we feel Google would not want ranking.  Which is why we thoroughly examine every site we sell links to.  We will not sell links to sites that do not in some way deserve to have a shot a ranking for the keywords they are going for.  It is my personal belief that as long as we are not, as a company, trying to manipulate Googles link algorithms by attempting to rank websites that have no reason to be where they are trying to go, that we are doing more good then bad.  It is also my belief that if we do our job right and connect our high quality clients sites with high quality trusted inventory partners, that we are only helping to positively build the “link profiles” of both websites.

-Jarrod

There are many ways to find links on the search engines.  All engines seem to have different ways to find and qualify these links.

In this article I look at MSN including it’s advanced link queries and how it too can be a valuable link building resource.