Aaron Wall at SEObook has put together a thought provoking post on current linking techniques, structure, and how Google reliance on trusted sources & domains is in jeopardy as those resouces become more and more abused.
Finding the Most Powerful Links
Anything that has been greatly trusted has been abused. The difference between the current abuse and past abuse is that in the past it was typically smaller individuals screwing with Google. Now Google has become a large enough force that they are actually undermining many of the business models of the providers of the content they are relying on.
Going forward, especially as Google, small content providers, unlimited choice, and easier access to the web marginalize the business models of many of the sites Google currently trust those sites are going to rely on users to help foot the bill. Google will give some content providers a backdoor deal, but most will have to look to user interaction to add value. That user interaction will be spamville. Thus I think rather than just trusting core domain levels I think Google is going to have to reduce their weighting on domain trust and place more on how well the individual page is integrated into the site and integrated into the web as a whole.
If everything Google trusts gets abused (it eventually does) and they are currently trusting raw domain related trust too much (they are) it shouldn’t be surprising if their next move is to start getting even more selective with what they are willing to index or rank, and what links they will place weight on.
Abuse and Exploitation of anything that yields a benefit (commercial or not) is never a question of IF, but WHEN. There is always a threshold that must be reached where benefits outweigh the potential penalties for doing it.
If it did not happen yet, then it simply means that the threshold was not reached yet, because either the benefits are too small or the potential penalties too great. I shift in size of one or the other and the threshold will be breached. Voila. … Next.
This post is yet another reason why the “guru” from DMA is wrong about the end of SEO marketing companies. At some point Google will be forced to change the ground rules of what makes solid rankings and what doesn’t; as it would appear by this post is coming soon regarding linking. As Carsten points out so well above, it is not IF but WHEN abuse happens. When the abuse becomes too great Google will again change its ranking technology and the average SEO person will likely miss the change.
By contrast those that operate in the SEO daily and understand the changes and trends will be (again) in a position to guide businesses in what is working and what is not, that is until those start becoming abused as well and then the process starts all over again.
The problem is that many people can learn spammy SEO techniques easily once they’re discovered.
For example, link building: My directory was getting too many spammy submissions, so I decided to create my own script instead of that free one. As soon as I released it, number of submissions decreased to 5-10/day from 50+/day. Just for your imagination, 95%-97% of those “incorrect” submissions were made from India. Unlike me, there are many people offering spam listings. In my opinion, links should be filtered like following:
1) Count all outgoing links from a site as a whole, mark this number as “A”,
2) Create some index which equals to “total number of pages on a site” divided by “total number of outgoing links”, mark this number as “B”.
These two simple numbers (A and B) could easily tell a search engine if it’s about spam listings or if it’s about quality. It’s just a though…But it could work. If I’m wrong, tell me, please.
More importance could be assigned to good, but still old, on-site SEO techniques. For example, site’s content (pages, words, unique words, images). I’m not talking about using numerous words within the title tag, about meta tags or so. I’m talking about seeing a page/site as a set of words, sentences.
Just for better understanding of other on-site SEO factors: Giving the importance to domain name was (and is still) good, since it’s easy to determine if a domain name was deisgned for rankings only (three or more keywords, too much characters within, and so on).
So the questions stands as “What is spam, what is not?”. Links are, were, and will be still good for every web site as well as content.
So spamming/abusing should be filtered by the ranking algorithm instead of creating other rankings factors. That’s my opinion.
Algorithms are constantly changing because people are abusing the system, especially with the growing population of webmasters.