What happened to all my (Your) back links?

[adesbarats]

Pffft....your English is better then mine and it's my first language! This what I've learned and the more knowledgeable SEO experts can chime in if I am wrong. It is difficult to fully identify all of your back links. You can use 3,4,5 different tools and get different answers. As some of the experts pointed out in this thread - don't sweat the back links too much - pay closer attention to your rank in the SERPS. Since losing all my backlinks, my ranking did not change for most keywords and actually improved for one or two!

As another poster pointed out - given that this sudden loss of back links seems to have been across the board, we have all been affected equally and hence you should not see a change in your position in the SERPS..

I have learned alot from these guys. They know their stuff. Find a few guys / gals who you feel are really good and search and read all their posts in WF. You will learn more from that exercise then reading any book...

Originally Posted by efex

Well. I'm a newbie and I'm on this post reading because I also got all my little backlinks down from 50+ to 10+

I wanted to know why that happened and someone pointed me to this thread.
It's true it started to deviate to a personal discussion on the backlinking and I hope it won't cause I had to read all of that to get to the good posts

So, I've learned here that YSE can do that and reduce your links whenever it wants. And others said that it even dodn't show all the backllinks for real in first place. (I could agree with that because it wasn't showing all my article's links from EZA and GOA)

The question I have is how do I know that SE's are looking at my links? Only by the rankings? But what happens if I still have some work to do until I get reasonable rankings? how do I know then if my links are counting? (I am talking about good links as articles, yahoo videos,e tc)
Is there a way to count my links for sure??

thanks

PS: forgive my english as it's not my main language

[4morereferrals]

Originally Posted by dburk

Hi 4morereferrals,

When you say "relative" links do you also mean to say "relevant links", as in links from relevant pages, pages that contain relevant keywords in or near anchortext? Are relevant links "utter nonsense" in your opinion?



Isn't this the main purpose of Google's algorithm? They seem to be pretty good at it. Your website topic is not a part of Google's algorithm, they achieve high relevance in SERPs by using a more granular approach. Simply put, they analyze and index individual documents, not websites.

If you'd like a demonstration of how well they can do this, and how quickly they can do it, simply enter the URL, where your article about an iPhone App is placed on your blog about auto insurance, into the AdWords Keyword Tool. This nifty tool uses the core "relevancy" algorithm to instantly analyse your page, finds most of the important keywords that are "relevant" to that individual page and even automatically sorts them by relevance. That last part is very significant, it demonstrates their ability to determine the degree of relevancy for each individual word.

That portion of the algorithm calculates and scores the on-page relevancy factors. The calculation for relevancy of inbound links is performed in a similar fashion, allowing for the different contextual application of proximity and prominence (core principals of Google's algorithm). This slightly different approach applies more weight to the anchortext followed closely by the words near the anchor that links to the indexed page, since those elements are closer in proximity and promenance, relative to the indexed page.

Google's algorithm is not only able to tell that your article is relevant, (absolute value), it is able to determine the degree of relevance (relative value). Google's superior application of the principals of prominence and proximity are part of their core competency. This effective approach produces a relatively high degree of relevancy in their query results and has led to their dominant position in the search engine industry..

I think some folks my be too quick to dismiss the importance that relevance plays in earning high SERP rankings. Backlinks without relevance may pass PR value, but PR alone wont get you ranked. That value must be channeled through a relevant link before you will get any increase in the relevancy score used to sort your position on the SERP.

I believe if we choose to look at relevance from a webmaster's perspective we may fail to see how a search engine determines relevancy. For us to be effective at SEO it may be helpful to understand relevancy from the perspective of the search engines. Does it matter what you or I call relevant, or irrelevant? Or is it more important to understand what Google considers to be relevant?

Google, nor any other major search engine, uses website topics to determine relevance. The primary reason search engines exist is because a more granular approach was needed to go beyond limitations of a website directory organized by website topic.

Many of the earliest search engines used meta tags, but these were not used universally, and were frequently abused. Google revolutionized the industry by developing an engine that read the visible content of a web page and analyzed the relevant keywords contained within the content. This ability combined with the ability to determine relevant inbound links, weighted by popularity (PageRank), to form a relevancy score that is used to sort the listings of the SERP. This same core concept is still at the root of Google's algorithm today.

Don,

As usual a well reasoned, well intentioned an informative post on this subject. I do respect your opinions, and think you a wise person. Likely far wiser than I in these areas. That said, my opinions [ key word there] do differ - in hte sense that I believe [ a word you used reptitively in your above reply ] that relevence "MAY" matter - but I think there is significant URBAN legend surrounding it being very over blown ... and often bandy'd about as Gospel from on High atop Mount Google.

Your latest reply and example was THE closest thing to actionable evidence Id seen posted here on the topic. I thank you for taking the time to do that.

I took you up on your example, and in short, I thought for sure that your concept would convince me of my errant views on "relevance" [ and yes I did mean relevance and not relative in my OP. Back to your test idea.

Interestingly enough - googles relevance intelligence - didnt seem to be all that intelligent on THE page I tested so far. Or maybe it did. might be early to relate the analysis.

It gave me a myriad of "relevant" terms on what IT THOUGHT the subject matter of the page was. The keyword it told me was relevant was insurance related. however that WORD appeared far less times on the page than what the actual focal point of the page content was. It found no relevance or made no suggestions of relevant keywords about a term that was indeed the focus of the page and appeared on the page > 7 times. It seemed to only find relevance about what it seemed to know already.

For example:

Cheap auto insurance, auto insurance quotes etc ... very common terms Im sure google has stuffed to the brim in its DB.

The flip side ... the google tool did not seem to locate or suggest or by way of your concept, "find relevant" a word that is the title of the document, repeated in the description tags, and in the first sentence, and repeated in bullet points, and every paragraph on the page and in H1 tags, and bolded, and very DENSE on the page, and in the extended URL.


So how great they are at finding and equating relevance - I remain unconvinced. How well they can tell my outbound links anchor text may or may not be relevant to the rest of the page's content = suspect in my mind. How google could correctly weight a outbound links value based on surrounding content of the anchor text ? This exercise didnt pull me over to your side of the argument. That is not to say that I cant be convinced or refuse to be ... Im just not seeing significant evidence I feel confident enough to call it valid. Sorry I dont mean to be stubborn.

I do however see MUCH evidence that people aquiring links - and lots of them from pages that are, or as most would define as irrelevant as we call them - but with the right [relevant] anchor text - having success in the serps.

There's been a bit of disccusion in the past as well that indicates that once the relevant keywords go on the page in the format of link anchor text - the page is now made "relevant". But I dont believe thats what the Relevance Urban Legend Purveyors mean are meaning when they repeat the mantra.

Thanks for your insights.

[kazlas]

I don't like that google did this. I mean, if people search for a "how to lose lard and be a titan" and if none of the results they are searching give REALLY any good, why shouldn't you create a site, build some links and get your reward for actually HELPING people to get what they were looking for? (google sniper method) Isn't this fair?

Why there are marketers for? To SELL! We don't have to know about the product, although I check some real reviews to find out this is good, why do we have to suffer for all the hard work we done building our links? We just wanted to help people, and of course get rewarded. If google takes this out - okay - marketers will go to social bookmarking, ppc, maybe some off them will become extra aggressive Xrummer spammers so they could sell product and earn for a living. You can't avoid commercial! We will still be searching for a new way to live. Google can win some battles, but that will make us develop a new ways anyway, so I don't see any point of that.

And for people that say "provide valuable content and the word will spread itself" there is a thing that is called SATURATION. I've read about ~50 of your mentioned quality content articles out there, guess what? I can't remember name of any author, because I've got what I wanted and left the site! There aren't 50 Elton John's out there, if I think of a golf I say "Tiger woods", if I think of a basketball I say "Michael Jordan", cooking - "Gordon Ramsey", finally marketing - "Mike Dillard". Who cares about the people who are second best? There are a lot more marketers than one per niche, and only one per niche already was willing to spend 5 years to write quality content, do great works and make reputation and be first is his field, the one that people will be buying from. Since who would ever want to spend that much of time before they could make some decent profits?.. This is stupid. Hope my post makes sense for you.

[daisyjones]

Yes i too notice dropping of backlinks in yahoo site explorer for my all sites.. although, in google it remains the same..but now the problem rectify and it shows all the backlinks again..dont know really what had happened?

[seopackages]

I noticed a drop in my links and competitors, but I also know that sometimes Yahoo much smaller memory backlink image. I do not know if they are, a glitch or what, but I saw my own sites fall to 200, then pull back to the normal amount the next day.

[turbulence63]

Originally Posted by Bill Farnham

Billy? How quaint.

I have no wisdom in this area.

I'm guessing you're one of the many who see gaming the system as more productive than contributing to the actual worth of the net by actually creating content that serves the purpose of bettering a users' experience when using search engines.

If you really consider yourself a business owner then focusing on your value to your customers should take precedence over simply taking the easy way out and buying your way into a market or niche for the sake of rankings using artificial means that add no value to the system whatsoever.

Are you seriously advocating that you think it is better for your customers that they are tricked into believing that you are someone of substance because you can afford a backlink packet?

Are your offerings so weak that they need to be artificially propped up because the real world won't provide any buzz?

I'm absolutely in favor of genuine links. I have links to my money site that go all the way back into the 1990's. I got them because other sites saw the value my site provides to that given market/niche.

What is amusing is to see 'newcomers' who are not aware that backlinking has had value over an extended period of time and seem to sense that backlinking is synonymous with all the artificial gaming they have been exposed to.

I am fully aware of my dinosauristic view on this matter, hence I fully appreciate viewpoints like yours whereby you believe that to be successful you need to resort to trickery in order to gain traction.

I just don't seem to grasp the concept of being 'king for the day' and having to start all over again when the SEs realize the only thing I can bring to the table is another 'me too' offering supported artificially by propping myself up.

I am also not advocating that you refrain from using tools you believe you need in order to get rankings. If you want to use them it's no skin off my back. Likewise, when your true value to the net is exposed and you fall back into oblivion I won't care, either.

If, on the other hand, you are truly creating substance that will stand on it's own merit, and using artificial backlinking to get you to the top of the serps where real people with real needs and wants are benefited by your existence, then I don't see it as being a big deal if you use those tactics.

Unfortunately, that is rarely the case...

~Bill

Well hey there Billy....I just lost all my backlinks ...all manually input ...all niche related .....this has nothing to do with your happiness on backlinks getting kyboshed. These were all legite backlinks.

And it wasn't thousands ...it was just a good number for my low competitive keyword to have a little bit ranking in the tremendous competition within the niche....now EFFEN NOTHING!

Even this forum promotes the very software that you despise. Not all automated software is negative aspect to getting backlinks...a lot of it is just to save time ....and so far I see it that corporate google has left the little guy no choice but to try any possible way to beat the competition that can afford their ripoff outrageous adwords advertising...as well favoritism to the well established and extremely authorative web sites.

Google is a manipulating monopoly of greed.

Just like your co-porate America ...extreme greed and manipulation to keep the little guy down.

It really P---ses me off when I see someone laughing at the little guy getting hammered after tremendous no choice efforts to try get a tiny tiny piece of the income that he desperately works for. Then all of a sudden loses it.

Only an an idiot laughs and smiles at that


Its not the guy who builds backilinks to try and promote and get his business marketed that creates the standards ...its the flippin manipulating greed of the controliing money machine (google) that sets the standards for small business to take whatever action necessary to survive.

What about your sites Billy ....any change...or are you one of the favorites?