Content Still King Though Network Links Be Dead

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Friday, 2 of November , 2007 at 9:24 am

(Source) For those who didn’t hear the news, a major change to the Google algorithm has punished blogs and sites that heavily cross link in networks. There are suggestions by some that the change is related to punishing sites that offer paid links, but so far the evidence doesn’t support that. I’ve found a broad range of sites selling links who haven’t had a page rank change, whilst a number of prominent sites which have never sold links have seen big page rank drops.

Yes, I agree. I’ve written about this before, just recently. And I do think there is some confusion on this subject because Google made two changes at once. They seem related, but they’re really not.

It’s common knowledge that Google took a punch at paid links. We expected it and it happened. No big deal - unless, of course, you sell links. But what about the rest of us?

Well, if you own a network of blogs, like I do, then the other change to Google’s algorithms is a much bigger deal. Duncan Riley does a good job of explaining the mass linking problem. I’ll summarize …

Mass linking is really about linking all the sites in a particular network, or sometimes just some of them, so that the newer sites benefit from the PageRank of the older ones. He’s right that this has led to some website owners building trash sites that provide no benefit and selling links or advertising after building up a healthy PR. That’s been a strategy that has worked. It won’t work any more.

Frankly, I’m glad. I think it will go a long way to improving the search results returned for queries made at Google. Of course, it’s just a matter of time before these savvy webmasters learn how to profit from the changes. Until then, suffice it to say that if you own a network of websites, don’t bother linking them to each other unless they are related in subject matter and content. It won’t pay you to link them together. And with that I’ll close with another quote from Duncan Riley. It’s easy to agree with him when he’s right:

I don’t think links, and in particular paid links are dead, after all Google still needs links to discover new sites and content to index, however the days of being able to build crap content and profit from it via advertising that relies on a high page rank are dead. Online marketers are left with a couple of options. Advertising is a definite option, and if you’re content is not that good (or even MFA) Google Adwords is one solution. I’d also think that Text Link buys aren’t dead: I’ve always bought text links that have an above the fold display anyway to get click traffic, and there is nothing from Google saying you cant buy links for this purpose, even if the Google juice benefits may no longer be there as much as they were previously.

Bottom line: Content is still king. Don’t mess with the king!

                      Category: Content Development, Link Building