Page 4 - Matt Cutts at PubCom

But how long will G continue to give significant credit to this kind of link spamming ? G is looking for more-natural links than this.

Links spamming is basically ballot box stuffing.
To stop this, Google would need to register voters, to confirm that they were valid.
If a registered voter was convicted of a felony, they would have their voting rights revoked

Ecommerce sites don't because:

1. They are all the same
2. Do fail to offer anything unique
3. Some actually do but inept designers can't see this and think it's easier to blame the ecommerce market for their shortcomings
4. All the above

I wonder...

Hi,

I'm a newbie on this forum, so please pardon me if I'm getting this wrong.

Brandall, do you think Cutts was talking about industry authority directories? For example, in the real estate industry, there are authority sites like IRED.com and RealEstateABC.com. They charge a nominal fee for listings in their directories.

Based on what you heard, did it sound like Cutts was talking about that kind of a paid link, or paid links to just a high PR site that decides to charge money rather than do recips?

Thanks,

Kathleen

Yeah, good question. What about directories like Business.com, a paid inclusion directoy. They seem to be ranking in at least the top 50's for their categories, so would seem like somewhat of an authority site. How would Google feel about those links? I mean c'mon, a paid link is a paid link. Or for that matter, what about Yahoo's directory?

-Michael

I would be suprised if they actually let out which directories are "good" or "bad".

No. In fact he specifically suggested submitting to authority, industry specific directories. That said, he also suggested that directories with no editorial evaluation were likely to be devalued. So, having to pay to get into the directory is not seen as buying links by Google (e.g., Yahoo was referenced as a valuable link generally). But what I took away was that paying to get into a directory was not necassarily a valuable link. I took away that editorial discretion was the key.

So a paid directory may still be useless unless they have some sort of qualification in addition to your cash?

That was my take away.

Brandall,

Thanks for the clarification.

Kathleen

Also discussed:

Meta tags: Matt suggested that you would not be penalized for spamming meta tags, because doing so could not help you rank. Kind of, no harm no foul. On a similar note, Tim Mayer from Yahoo suggested that your meta tags are used by Yahoo to determine which page on your site is most relevant for a given search. He implied this in his presentation about what webmasters should do, and one of his points was to keep your title and meta tags up to date when you change content so that Yahoo could sitinguish which of your pages is most relevant for a given search.

Jagger was designed to make spam blogs and other newer link spam techniques much less valuable. They are agressively working on ways to identify and eliminate any value from these.

In his final comments today, Matt highlighted subdomain spam, suggesting that sites using this technique are about to get hit.

Dude - you are killing me! Can you write up a list of stuff? This "new tip" every hour is appreciated but I want it all - NOW!

Thanks Brandall, interesting thread.

Earlier a few people were discussing G's ability to detect 3-way exchanges. If a bit of thought was put into it I think it could be hard to detect (spread over a number of sites).
But I'd imagine quite a few people would just have 2 sites, one giving links, one getting links. IMO this wouldn't be too hard to detect. Here's how I'd imagine it would be done: Each domain would have an ID (number,code,etc). If domain 1234 had one way links coming in from sites a,b,c,d,etc, and domain 9876 had one way links going out to exactly the same sites, this would raise a flag. Now it's obviously not going to be a concern if you've only got 5-10 sites participating in your 3-way links, but if you start talking 100's or 1000's it can get quite easy to detect. And even easier to detect if you're not limiting your exchanges to related sites.

Yeah, can we get a look at the whole thing? Pleeeaaaaaase?