36 replies to this topic

[dzinerbear]

"Dzinerbear,
Why don't you start a thread concerning your disbelief in the power and importance of backlinks. We have established, site unseen, that you clients site is very unlikely to have been ignored by Google simply because of the ugly Word code. So if you really think that to much attention is being given to backlinks start a thread and tell us why you think this way.
Bob Wakfer, Computer Partners"


First of all, I'd like to say that I was happy to have discovered this forum shortly after it was created because it was a fresh place with some new ideas, people were friendly and willing to help, and unlike webmasterworld, which is also a fine resource, it's not so crowded in here. So, I didn't have to wade through a lot of me-too and "I think" posts to get good information.

Up until last night, I've had nothing but great experiences here. However, if members here make a habit of jumping all over posters, calling into question their integrity, and essentially calling them liars, then I don't imagine there's going to be much of a community left here.

That's not to say I don't think anyone should publicly disagree with one another here, but for goodness sake, please READ a post before rip into someone.

Now to the issue at hand ... backlinks and MY opinion.

First, I need to say that although I do some corporate work, most of my experience and current sites are adult. Out of respect for the members of this board (and probably the TOS) I'm not going to post URLs or discuss specific keywords. I don't think it's appropriate in a mixed-company and business-like forum such as this. If this were an adult board, I'd post away.

Now, in reading through your posts to my question about the site created in Word, I need to clarify that the site I put up in April had backlinks. I said it didn't because what I call an internal link, you all call a backlink. When I said it had no backlinks, I meant that my site was an island on Net, no other site linked to it.

Nevertheless, my site (when launched) consisted of a index page that linked to five galleries. At the bottom of each gallery was a string of text that linked to each of the other five galleries and the home page. So essentially, each page had five backlinks, as you call it.

I worked for two years for a large online adult groups of sites, so I'm not a newbie to this stuff. I was always told that while internally linking one page to another was helpful, a link from another site to yours was going to be hugely important and more effective. So I figured with no one willing to link to me (because the adult business tends to be pretty me-me-me) it was going to be a long haul to the top.

Imagine my surprise when the Esmeralda update was released and I had top ten rankings for many keywords I went after. (And they weren't words that people weren't looking for, as someone aluded to yesterday.) But I had lots of text (discussion about the people in the galleries and short stories) I had good titles, lean keyword meta tags, good descriptions, and good ALTs. Essentially, my sites are not regular adult sites; I put a lot of effort into the written content.

I think my top tens were good successes considering there are whole adult empires out there pumping out these huge link farms and linking all of their individuals sites to dozens and dozens (even hundreds) of other sites, and engaging in cloaking activity.

Still to this day, I don't have very many sites linking to mine. I think I managed to get my one site listed in about four adult directories, my other two domains (which are new) have fewer than that. But, of course, I link all three domains together, which I was also told would have limited effects because they were virtual domains all located on the same server.

I chose not to worry any more about getting sites to link to mine because I was reading too many situations about sites being penalized for the behaviour of other sites, or for being a part of link farms, and I just thought, "I just want to be left alone; I don't want to put the marketing of my sites into the hands of others. If someone asks, and they truly have a worthwhile site, I'll link to them.

When I was working for that company over the two years, the marketing guy showed me the SEO ropes, but he was learning, too. And that brings me to my hesitation about all of the backlink hype.

This marketing guy discovered the title tag was pretty important, so what did he do? Cram as many keywords as possible into it. He discovered that keywords in the domain name were helpful. So we started registering ten-word-long domain names. Linking was important (and we just called it linking not backlinking, hence a part of my confusion.) So, at the bottom of every single site he had me paste in sometimes as many as 50 or 60 links to similar sites.

I remember suggesting that perhaps we should err on the side of caution, but he just, "Why, it's all legal."

So, what do I learn now, two years later? Well, many people think that, with Google anyway, a short concise title will get you a better ranking. Perhaps at one time a big long keyword-stuffed title was good, maybe the algorithms were changed, I don't know. All I know if that we had found a loophole in the system that allowed us to help our rankings. We used it, overused it, and maybe even abused it. Now, it's gone the other way, although some people say Alta Vista likes them long.

I'm applying the same logic to backlinking. The SEO boards have been going nuts about backlinking for a while now. Everyone knows how important it is. A lot of people out there are abusing it. After we carry on like this for a while, I think the search engines start to change things because, well, the rankings are starting to verge on the meaningless side of things. (And by meaningless I mean, if I can manipulate my site into a number one ranking, it doesn't necessarily mean it's a good site on a specific subject.)

So, while I don't disagree that backlinking might be important, as far as I'm concerned, I managed to get top ten rankings for my five little galleries, by initially having absolutely no outside links. (I didn't get any outside links until after Esmeralda was released.) I continue to get good placement for new keywords I go after, and my traffic is in the tens of thousands of visitors and doubling every two weeks.

After Google dumped the monthly update system, I put up a new domain. It started with two galleries and no index page off the main domain. So that's just two pages linking to one another. In less than two weeks, I took the number one spot of a keyword I was seeing over and over again in my logs. It's not the biggest keyword in my biz, but it brings me a lot of traffic.

So, a two-page site with one link from another page within the same domain managed to go from nowhere to number one. I don't know about you guys, but for me that is not a stellar example on the importance of backlinking. But then, perhaps my thinking on this whole issue is flawed: maybe I'm thinking 100 links is better than one, and that's not really the case.

But, I think a lot of backlinking is articially important. If I have ten pages all linked together and another guy has the same ten pages not linked together, it doesn't mean mine are better than his. It just means I know how to play the game better than he does. The search engines will eventually figure out that we're all manipulating the results, and then, the hoo-haw tag will be the next really important element of a web page. We'll all be inserting a hoo-haw tag everywhere we can. And sites with no hoo-haw tags will sink to the bottom of the heap.

Finally, I'm not here to fight. I'm here to discuss, help, and learn. So, please don't take anything I've said personally. This is just my experience. If backlinking is hugely helpful to you, that's great, but we don't need to kill one another to feel we're right. Do we?

Dzinerbear

[qwerty]

There's no doubt in my mind that Google has seen the rise of the strategy of reciprocal linking and has taken that into account in its algo. Links seem to mean more these days if they only go one way... and that's already being abused by people agreeing to reciprocal links and then either failing to add the link, removing it after a while, or hiding it inside a javascript so that spiders won't recognize it. So what's Google to do? Backlinks are a big part of the algo.

With that in mind, what you've written interests me a great deal. Do you have any idea of how the site was found if you're sure it couldn't have been from a link? Did you use the Add URL form, or were you just randomly found somehow? I'd love to see the line from your log that shows googlebot's first visit.

[Scottie]

Excellent post, dzinerbear!

There is no reason we cannot be respectful of each other and you have been an excellent member with well-thought out posts.

It surprises me that your area of expertise is the adult entertainment world... I tend to think of people in that area as "less than ethical" and you seem to be concerned about doing things the right way. Since that is a highly competitive arena, IMO it makes your findings even more interesting.

[dzinerbear]

I figured out early on that "more" isn't always better. Also, to my employer's credit, they were the regular run-of-the-mill adult company. They didn't engage in cloaking, the bait and switch, hiacking people's favourites, adding links to desktops, pop-ups and pop-unders, getting people's credit card through the offer of a "free" membership.

As a result, they have a very low charge-back ratio and I learned a lot of good solid skills.

Unfortunately, being honest and providing people with a good product doesn't get you number one rankings in Google. I still have a hard time wrestling the number one away from a competitor because I'm pretty sure they're engaged in clokaing. I won't go there. It might get me number one in the short term, in the long run, it'll bring me trouble.

Thanks
Dzinerbear

[compar]

Now to the issue at hand ... backlinks and MY opinion.

Now, in reading through your posts to my question about the site created in Word, I need to clarify that the site I put up in April had backlinks. I said it didn't because what I call an internal link, you all call a backlink. When I said it had no backlinks, I meant that my site was an island on Net, no other site linked to it.

I think the first thing we need is the definition of a backlink. BTW I had never heard the term until I got Googles toolbar. But by Googles definition backlinks are both links from the internal navigation on the site and from outside pages. Also remember that Google will only display backlinks -- internal or external -- from pages to which they have assigned a PR value of 4 or higher.

However when the various people on this forum say that you can't be found without backlinks what they mean is inbound links from other web pages. This seems never to be said explicitly but can always be understood in the context, because if Google hasn't indexed your site how can they possibly use your internal backlinks to find you.

So can we agree on this understanding of Googles term backlinks and proceed from there?

[dzinerbear]

With that in mind, what you've written interests me a great deal. Do you have any idea of how the site was found if you're sure it couldn't have been from a link? Did you use the Add URL form, or were you just randomly found somehow? I'd love to see the line from your log that shows googlebot's first visit.

With your questions and comments, I'm remembering more details.

I put up my site on April 18, and I'm remembering now that it actually only had an index page and one gallery. The other four galleries weren't uploaded until approximately two weeks later.

I don't have access to the logs for the first few days the site was up because after eight days I changed the host. My first host was too expensive. So, I don't have access to the logs for the first eight days of the sites existence.

I definitely used Google's "add a url" feature because I just figure, why should I sit around and wait for them to find me.

After I put up the remaining four galleries, I would have submitted at least one of them to Google. I'd be surprised if I submitted all four individually because I'm usually pretty cautious about that. My hunch is that I would have just submitted one site and let Google find the links to the others once the bot arrived at my site.

I've run my April, May and two weeks of June logs through WebLogExpert, and I'm not seeing anything about bot activity. I'm not sure what that means. I do know that around June 15 when Google's Esmeralda update began to appear, my site was finally in. Before that, I did a allinurl almost daily and I was not listed. (That sure was a frustrating two months.)

So, if I was spidered by Google between April 18 and April 25, I won't know about it. It I was spidered afterwards (up to June 15) the information isn't showing up and I don't know why. It could be that WebLogExpert isn't the best software to use, I don't know. Also, I seem to recall there being a time in early July after I started using the trial version of WLE that my reports seemed to get better (have more detail). I changed no settings, so I'm wondering if my host made some changes in the information they gathered. Don't know.

What is even more puzzling is that I have another domain that isn't in Google yet. I kept it separate from my other two domains because the content was drastically different. But I followed the same approach of linking all of the pages within the new site. Nothing. It hasn't been indexed yet by Goggle. (Pages that I've put up on other sites have since been added to Google, but this one still hasn't.) So, last week, I put a link from my site that is doing the best to this new one, hoping that this will get it in there. And this new one also has a couple of links from some other adult directory sites, so I'm really puzzled by this. Maybe I just need to be patient for another week or so. Google seems to be adding my new sites about two weeks after they're up and I've submitted them to "add a url."

That's about all I can tell you.

Dzinerbear

[compar]

Still to this day, I don't have very many sites linking to mine. I think I managed to get my one site listed in about four adult directories, my other two domains (which are new) have fewer than that. But, of course, I link all three domains together, which I was also told would have limited effects because they were virtual domains all located on the same server.

I don't think that the fact that the urls were on a virtual domain will make any difference. Google will see the links as coming from different domains and as such will evaluate them and adjust the pages ranking accordingly.

There are certainly sites with 100s if not 1000s of incoming or inbound backlinks who rank well. But there are other site with much samller quantities of backlinks that also rank well. I agree with you that I think the title is probably the single most important element in a sites ranking and we should probably discuss good title practices in another thread.

However I think that there is almost unamimous agreement on this forum that;

1. Your chance of having a site found and indexed without some inbound link somewhere is very close to zero if not impossible.

2. Your chance of ranking well increases as the number of backlinks from pages with a PR4 or better increase.

I look forward to your thoughts on this.

[compar]

I definitely used Google's "add a url" feature because I just figure, why should I sit around and wait for them to find me.

Because a lot of people think that you will be found sooner from inbound links. And some will claim that submitting your URL may actually delay Googles time to indexing your page.

[dzinerbear]

I think the first thing we need is the definition of a backlink. BTW I had never heard the term until I got Googles toolbar. But by Googles definition backlinks are both links from  the internal navigation on the site and from outside pages.  Also remember that Google will only display backlinks -- internal or external -- from pages to which they have assigned a PR value of 4 or higher. So can we agree on this understanding of Googles term backlinks and proceed from there?

Thanks for the definition of backlinks, I never was able to find one on the Net that I could understand.

Cool. So now, we're at square one.

However, what I'm not understanding is your points about page rank. So, maybe you can give me a concrete example that I can look up in Google to see what you mean by "Google will only display backlinks -- internal or external -- from pages to which they have assigned a PR value of 4 or higher."

Or try this, perhaps I'm on the right track. (I can't give you the link, it's an adult site.)

I have a site www.domain.com/keyword and it ranks number one in Google for "keyword." It has a page rank of zero.

When I type links:www.domain.com/keyword (I also tried link:) Google says that there aren't any. I know there are several from both within www.domain.com and several from www.myotherdomain.com, and I think a couple of adult directories are linked as well.

So, are you saying that Google is telling me there aren't any links to that page because it has a PR of 0? Am I understanding that if it had a PR of 4, then Google would suddenly show me what pages were linked to it?

Thanks for your patience and the (I hope) forthcoming explanation.

Dzinerbear

[dzinerbear]

I definitely used Google's "add a url" feature because I just figure, why should I sit around and wait for them to find me.

Because a lot of people think that you will be found sooner from inbound links. And some will claim that submitting your URL may actually delay Googles time to indexing your page.

This definitely doesn't seem to be what's happening, at least to me and since Google stopped doing the monthly update.

When I put up a new site on my two main domains, I submit it to Google and it's in within two weeks. That seems pretty fast to me. Now, perhaps if I did nothing, maybe it would be in in a day or two. I don't know. But given the old four to five week update schedule Google used to maintain, two weeks seems pretty fast.

I've just put up a new site yesterday, so I'll try an experiment and do nothing and see what happens. I'll let you know when it finally hits Google.

Dzinerbear

[qwerty]

Google keeps track of all of a page's backlinks. However, it doesn't show the ones that have a PR of less than 4. If at least one backlink is required to get into the Google index (and I know, for the sake of this discussion, we haven't accepted that as an absolute fact) it is not, in my opinion, necessary for that backlink to come from a page with any particular PR.

What will make G follow the backlink faster is if it's on a page that gets crawled more often. This may be a coincidence, but those pages often have a pretty high PR.

[Jill]

Submitting you site to google definitely will NOT slow it down from being indexed. It is possible it will even speed it up. It's really just a personal preference. Doesn't hurt to submit it, doesn't hurt not to submit it.

J

[compar]

So, are you saying that Google is telling me there aren't any links to that page because it has a PR of 0? Am I understanding that if it had a PR of 4, then Google would suddenly show me what pages were linked to it?

No you have it backwards. First let me ask if you have a copy of Googles toolbar? If not you may not know what a pages PR is. But assuming you have the tools bar here is the answer to your question.

What matters is the PR from the site that is linking to you. If the site that is linking to you has not got a PR of 4 or higher Google will not show the link in their "link:'" search. It has nothing to do with the PR rank of your site.

Well that isn't entirely true because as we know Google also shows internal links as backlinks. So in this case if the pages of your site don't individually have a PR4 or better even your internal links will not show up.

Is that clear?

[dzinerbear]

No you have it backwards. First let me ask if you have a copy of Googles toolbar? If not you may not know what a pages PR is. But assuming you have the tools bar here is the answer to your question.

What matters is the PR from the site that is linking to you. If the site that is linking to you has not got a PR of 4 or higher Google will not show the link in their "link:'" search. It has nothing to do with the PR rank of your site.

Well that isn't entirely true because as we know Google also shows internal links as backlinks. So in this case if the pages of your site don't individually have a PR4 or better even your internal links will not show up.

Is that clear?

Yes, I have the toolbar and yes, I think I understand it. Let me reiterate:

So, if abc site has a PR6 and links to www.mydomain.com/keyword, then my site will show up when I type links:www.mydomain.com/keyword into Google.

Okay, I'm clear on that it. And judging by the fact that when I check the links: and there aren't any, it make sense because I have very few outside site linking, and the ones that do probably don't have a PR above 4. (In fact I just checked and the main outside link has a PR of 0.)

Fine. Now I have a further question and I'm not trying to be difficult, I'm just trying to understand.

If www.mydomain.com/keyword has the number one spot for "keyword" and it's a decent keyword, and it's bringing me a lot of traffic, why do I care whether or not this site appears when someone types in links:www.mydomain.com/keyword. I mean, who, other than SEO's is entering links:www.mydomain.com/keyword into Google? Am I missing something?

Are we perhaps talking about that in this situation my site won't appear in the "similar pages" link when a look for "xyz keyword" in Google? Or are we talking about the speed at which my new pages get indexed because it has a link from a PR8 site, which is probably getting spidered all of the time, so mine get spidered along with it?

Thanks
Dzinerbear

[compar]

Yes, I have the toolbar and yes, I think I understand it. Let me reiterate:

So, if abc site has a PR6 and links to www.mydomain.com/keyword, then my site will show up when I type links:www.mydomain.com/keyword into Google.

Yes your domain will show up but so will the link from the PR6 page which is really what the search is about. The search says show me the sites that are linked to me. In this case it is th PR6 site.

Fine. Now I have a further question and I'm not trying to be difficult, I'm just trying to understand.

If www.mydomain.com/keyword has the number one spot for "keyword" and it's a decent keyword, and it's bringing me a lot of traffic, why do I care whether or not this site appears when someone types in links:www.mydomain.com/keyword. I mean, who, other than SEO's is entering links:www.mydomain.com/keyword  into Google? Am I missing something?

Well it is difficult for me to believe that a site will rank number one on any popular keyword and have a PR of 0. The only time this might happen is in the first month or so of the listing. Google takes longer to update the PR for a site than the indexing of a site. If you would like to send me the URL privately I would like to see it.

Are we perhaps talking about that in this situation my site won't appear in the "similar pages" link when a look for "xyz keyword" in Google? Or are we talking about the speed at which my new pages get indexed because it has a link from a PR8 site, which is probably getting spidered all of the time, so mine get spidered along with it?

Nothing we have said here applies to the "similar pages" link. Frankly I'm not really familiar with how Google picks site to be included there. But yes, your site will probably get indexed sooner from a inbound backlink from a PR8 site because it is entirely possible that Google will be crawling that site very regularly.