google guidelines

While Google has been repeatedly warning, penalizing and even banning websites which does Link Exchanges, it is quite strange to see Skip, Senior Product Manager for Office Live Small Business promote link exchange openly.

On the MS Office Live blog, Skip openly propagates to go for link exchanges. He states, “If you want lots of visitors to your Web site, it helps to have lots of links to your Web site. Link exchanges — sometimes called reciprocal linking or link swaps — are a popular way to generate more links.”

While Google, Yahoo and MSN guidelines severely warn webmasters not to indulge in any such activities, it is quite surprising to see a senior product manager recommend one of the most familiar black hat methods.

Going on further, Skip also recommends to even use link-management software and join automated link-exchange programs. Jeess.. That’s hypocrisy! That’s blasphemy against search engines!!

He recommends several ways to do link exchange.

1. Do it manually
2. Use link-management Software
3. Join an automated link-exchange program
4. Pay someone else to create your links

Well the article does not end with that. He even recommends third-party tools to effectively increase links. I wonder if he works for Microsoft or it looks like these third-parties have paid him hands full to have their products promoted.

Recently, Google removed the “Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!” suggestion from its guidelines. One would accept this if mentioning Yahoo alone was removed as it’s an competitor. But why DMOZ? Does this mean Google also accepts the fact that DMOZ has lost all the importance it had few years back or does Google mean it’s no longer going to give importance to such directories?

I had written an article “DMOZ is Dead” few months back which clearly states the huge failures the world’s largest human edited directory is facing.

1. A large number of dead links
2. It is extremely difficult and you should really feel lucky if you even get a mail back stating that your link was submitted or the reason for rejection.
3. Huge number of duplicate links
4. Messed up Categories and Sub Category duplicates.
5. Very slow or no response from DMOZ volunteering editors.

But this might not just be the only reason for Google to remove recommending postings to DMOZ. As one might be aware, a large number of search engine optimizers and webmasters post their websites to thousands of free and paid directories to bring up their rankings. This can be a serious issue from Google’s standpoint as encouraging this would make it difficult to analyze genuine websites who do not go for such short cut methods to bring up rankings.

In a recent webmaster chat conference, Google had this to say:

Question: Recently, you removed this suggestion: “Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!” from your guidelines. Is there any chance that you will be discounting these kinds of links for ranking value in future?

Google’s Matt Cutt answers: There’s always the chance that we’ll discount directory links in the future. What we were seeing was quite a few novice people would see the “directory” recommendation and go out and just try to submit to a ton of directories, even if some of the directories were lower-quality or even fly-by-night directories that weren’t great for users. Right now we haven’t changed how we’re weighting directory links–we’ve only removed the directory suggestion from the webmaster guidelines.

Google has instructed publishers not to blend Google Ads with the content. The new Google Adsense placement guidelines can affect at least 60% of Adsense users.

Many publishers place Google Ads right below the topic or in between an article to increase clicks. Some publishers have even resorted to show Google Ads as a horizontal or vertical menu forcing visitors to click on it thinking it’s the website menu. Read the full story