Please be more careful about what you say here

I guess we are talking about beginners and newbies which don't know where to ask or how to solve a problem and exactly thats why they ask questions here. If they can figure out what problems they can face ahead than why would they ask. It is the duty of the thread responder to answer the question by discussing all pros and cons of doing one thing

Yet it is all happening because we want to condescend to Google. Its spelled G O O G L E not G O D!

They are having a great time at Google making everyone dance to their tune.

It's time to change the music. If any are brave enough to march to their own drum. If enough do it, then Google will become an irritation to surfers who are not getting the quality they want.

I'm all for quality. But quality can never fit on the first page of Google ever! It's too big for Google to handle. Google will suffer from its weight - soon enough!

Actually, there are a few things Google can do to determine link value...I won't say good/bad, but rather better/worse, or that whether Google can tell if a link was "hand made" or "machine made", but it's likely they can tell if it's more likely that a link is machine made.

For example, anyone that uses a program like Scrapebox or Xrunner knows about "footprints" and if we can find and use these footprints, so can Google. If we can automate posting comments on these sites, I'd bet Google can devalue links on pages that use these same footprints. Who knows if they do this now or not, but I wouldn't be surprised if they do in the future.

Google also probably has a list of sites that give access to visitors, like social bookmarking sites, forums, etc, as well as the ability to tell what part of a blog is "content" posted by the author and which are comments. Google has a patent on file where they try to determine the location of links on a page, and if they can do this, it makes sense to give more value to links in the content of a page/blog than to links in the comment section of a blog.


As far as going viral, I'd also bet there's some patterns to this...Such as links being posted in what is known as the "blogoshpere" (blogs which Google has whitelisted) as well as social media like Facebook and Twitter. If a site is so popular that zillions of links are popping up over-night, you'd think that people would also be tweeting the link, etc. It seems that going viral would produce something like a bell curve when counting links?

Then, we have the issue of link decay, which is finding that a site's number of links is decreasing, which may be an indication that webmasters are removing links, possibly because of low quality/spam.

My point is NOT that these links will hurt a site, other than the idea of link decay, only that there's ways for Google to determine better/worse links in many cases and that some links may not be of any or little value.

BTW, I'm curious whether using a sophisticated plan where you could add a bunch of links, then remove them "could" hurt another site due to link decay.

Very well said! As it was from the beginning - nothing can ever replace quality content. In the final analysis that's all you need to do - stay with what you're passionate about and write about it like the devil!

I agree with KabirC and Big Mike here. It's not clear that your site was hurt by sending links to it. We can argue all day about what types of links are better or worse, but in the end links are links. New sites move up and down, and when cared for and linked to, they almost always come out higher than before.

Moreover, we should all take responsibility for our own actions, and that includes doing lots of testing for ourselves. The best way to lay rumors and disinformation to rest is through action and testing.