My main competitor has been de-Googled

[peterjhale]

it's not that you'll get a penalty, it's just forum links won't be counted -- why should they -- you're voting for yourself....

Re-read my post above--it's just thoughts--the whole crux of google is links. People who want to link to your site because it has value

Now, if all those links are just your signature .....

[inbakumar]

Hi Peter,

It looks like you were typing a reply whilst I was replying to Ian's post too .

Anyway, my post concerning your reciprocal linking is different to your arguments on forum signatures.

The problem I have with your latest reasoning about 'forum signature' is that my site ranked well for our main search keywords before any links from my signature links here. This is the forum I started posting first and it is the olny forum where I use the 'property development finance' signature link. BTW it is shown here because I wanted to advertise my company's services to visitors of this forum and not as part of some link building exercise.

My question to you/readers of my post was to ask whether my site got penalised because of the signature link on the basis it had good rankings (either page 1 or 2) before I started posting here and now the site is on page 7 or 8. i-e if the signatures have zero value then the site should have the normal rankings it had before. Currently a lot of sites with rubbish content rank above us. Why? Hence my question whether we suffered a penalty.

In your latest post, you say that we shouldn't be awarded for time consuming posts on forums. Why???? . For me it would work out cheaper to go and place electronic adverts (generating links which you say will give higher rankings) on directory sites for £5 - £10 each rather than spend time here. Are you therefore suggesting that the search engine will reward companies with more advertising money and not hard work? After all time = money .

Regards,


Joel

[Ian J]

I'm not sure that Peter is right about forum signatures. According to MSN Joel's site has 323 inbound links but Google only show 65 as they will only show the links from higher PR pages which they assume to have better value.

Like my site, many of Joel's inbound links are from signature links here which would seem to imply that Google likes them otherwise they wouldn't show them at all.

I have yet another site http://www.factoring-uk.net that last week ranked in 9th place on page one for the term "factoring quote" and this has also gone walkabouts despite having no reciprocal links nor appearing in my forum signatures anywhere.

[peterjhale]

Hi Joel

I was putting my search engine hat on.

If you were building a SE that was built on links and wanted the best links to rate a site, forum links would not be part of that.

Have you not posted here for a long time though? Not in the last couple of days?

No one knows for sure what has just happened with google - pure speculation - in a lot of previous changes google has made, those sites that got hit bad actually came back as #1s

It's best not to do anything whilst all of this is going on and then when it is finished see what has happened.

If you want to do a bit of home work now, have a look at the site that comes up tops for your KWs. Do a link check on msn for the sites that link into your comp. Have a look at the links on the sites linking into your comp. Are these links:

- on their own (ie: no text around them)
- from on topic sites
- under a banner "sponsored links"
- from sites nothing to do with finance
- forum sigs
- the text in those links
- site side links


etc

You can then build up a picture about what helps that site rank. I am sure it is still about links -- but not all links are created equally

[inbakumar]

Originally Posted by peterjhale

Hi Joel

I was putting my search engine hat on.

If you were building a SE that was built on links and wanted the best links to rate a site, forum links would not be part of that.

Have you not posted here for a long time though? Not in the last couple of days?

Hi Peter,

I joined this forum in June 2004. Even before I started posting here, my site enjoyed good rankings. The web site existed since early 2003 and the layout and content hasn't changed much. Yes, we added some new pages, changed some text etc but that is it. Never tried to optimize the site (it is still a frames based site!) or tried any other tactics to get higher rankings. Any keywords we didn't get good rankings for, we advertised both online and off line.

I also disagree with your comments about your search engine hat. To be successful in search engine business, you need to provide/have:

(1) Good content
(2) Fast results
(3) Ease of use

The above requires ability to crawl and index a vast number of web pages (i-e lots of computing power) and things like the tool bar to provide (2) and (3) above.

How you rank the sites in search results is a different matter. Relevant links could be part of the equation but could not be the main one. Content is! As Ian pointed out in his earlier posting on this thread, the current search results are showing not highly relevant sites.

At the end of the day, we are not really worried but only irritated. We never based the business on getting higher rankings on the web as we knew doing otherwise would be foolish. All we need to do though is to ramp us the other channels!.

Thanks for the other stuff you mentioned but I have better things to do in life .

Regards,


Joel

[Enigma121]

On the subject of Google backlinks estimate, our site lists as only having one link on Google, yet has hundreds in MSN. Is the difference typically as large as that?

[peterjhale]

It can be

No one knows what links google provides. It used to be (maybe 18months ago) those with PR4 and above. But now it is just a mixture.

I wouldn't worry about it. Google knows all your links (and that's why some sites have fallen recently)

[Ian J]

Originally Posted by Enigma121

our site lists as only having one link on Google, yet has hundreds in MSN. Is the difference typically as large as that?

Mine has 164 links acknowledged by Google and 3,723 by MSN, 4,090 by Yahoo and a staggering 6,480 by All The Web

[Ian J]

I noticed this morning that Google's cache is dated 8th October whereas until recently the site was being spidered on a daily basis, judging by the cache dates.

[peterjhale]

Teneric used to get a daily cache when it was a PR6

Now it's a PR5 it's about weekly. But we maintain #1 listings so wouldn't worry too much about that

Looking at some of the forums this morning, it is suggested additionally that google may have turned up the sandbox filter a bit

Most sites ranking in the top 10 appear to have their domain registered pre-jun2003 -- not sure how that affects your industries; worth a check