Julie Joyce wrote a very interesting article on Search Engine Land about an hour ago on Google and natural links. We always tend to think of natural links as the prize or reward for creating engaging content. You didn’t pay for them, you did not manipulate the system, someone just liked your content and either included it in an article or on a forum or blog comment.
Julie points out that SearchEngineLand.com is one of her best sources for client referrals and yet it seems Google has flagged those very links with regards to her website.
From the article:
Here’s one of my biggest problems with links: What is natural and positive for users may be what sinks your rankings. That’s true for several reasons, but most notably the following two:
- Marketers will absolutely ruin a successful tactic by overdoing it, thereby getting it flagged for addition to Google’s list of what constitutes a violation of their guidelines. Maybe someone got a great link naturally and decided that it was a gameable method, and bam! That type of link is now potentially dangerous.
- Google’s algorithm cannot take lots of nuances into account, and there’s no way that a machine can accurately judge intent 100% of the time. Heck, I can’t always tell when someone’s being sarcastic.
So, what do you do when Google flags a valuable inbound link as a spammy one? Do you say, hey, I don’t care about my users, or hey, I don’t care about Google? That’s a tough choice.
Julie goes on to look at a client website that is based on quotes, I don’t know about you but I see people quoting on Twitter, Facebook and forums everyday. In the case of the client they had people leaving legitimate links back to the quote site.
It seems at the end of the day Google just likes to continue to make things more difficult when there is no need for it. There is also the question of what do you do if a link brings you business but Google doesn’t like it ?
Read the full article on SearchEngineLand
