SEO Dizziness. When Advice Comes In The Contradictory Version
I have made quite some lengthy posts on why backlinks are not apparently the only ones responsible for a specific page’s PR. Nonetheless they do hold a major importance as the only way a search engine could measure the relative importance of a major website. The more they are and the more authority they hold the better. So far so good and everything is so nice, dandy and clear that Captain Obvious would like to have said that.
Now of course, from the standpoint of search engines a backlink holds value as long as it is considered organic, which means that its placement enhances the information added and also that ideally the bloke that put it there was genuinely thinking about the information welfare of his readers, not about the 5 bucks he received to put the link there. This is also the reason for which Google seems to appreciate non reciprocal links over reciprocal ones. That’s what you would think, that’s what everybody thinks. Well not quite everybody. Take a look over this article called Are backlinks really that important? . You will quickly see that the author endorses the idea that reciprocal links work best. Now what on earth is one supposed to think now. The really strange part is the fact that the article promotes quite well the concept of reciprocal links and the effect that broken links have in losing the voting power of a certain page, but still this is a little bit too much. It’s nothing short of ridiculing the link development market and the ever complex mechanisms of developing n-way links to trick the search engine bots.
So what should you as a reader do? Well, quite simply, always be skeptical and always read more than one source and if the sources keep on disagreeing, despite their growing number then it is a clear sign that everybody makes educated guesses and everybody is as clueless as you on that matter. Now this is a refreshing thought.
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Comments
The problem is that PR doesn’t necessarily translates in good SERPs. I still think that one way links are better than reciprocal ones. But again I tend to assume that search engines appreciate more relevant links instead of irrelevant, no matter if they are reciprocal or not.
Thanks for sharing Doug.
Regards, George
I currently own an arcade site which gets quite a few amount of hits from google. It ranks #5 for a very highly targeted keyword, I did nothing but strictly reciprical links, didn’t put one dime into purchasing links. Now I understand you are talking about PR, my site is PR5, not great but average.
Great article george!