Customer Street SEO Articles & Help

The Arrival of Google

Just before the turn of the century Google announced its arrival to the online community. In the years following Google consistently expanded to become the largest search engine in the world. As their market share grew search engine optimisers started to pay more and more attention to the Google algorithm and what it takes to be at the top of the new “number one” search engine.

The Dawn of a New Era

With Google paying so much attention to linking, the world’s webmasters quickly realised that they needed to establish as many in bound links to their sites as possible. The SEO world saw the arrival of link exchange programmes, link farms, link selling, link building services, websites where companies in related sectors could work together and the exchange of links with other, like minded, webmasters.

This was never what Google intended and over the years they have tweaked their algorithm considerably to try and weed out these bad practices. The aspects which Google now takes into account when trying to evaluate the quality of a link include:

• The anchor text
• The PageRank of both URLs
• The age of the link
• The content on the URL the link comes from
• The content on the URL the link goes to
• The content on the rest of both sites

This is a summary of a huge variety of inter-related factors.

Link Selling

The most recent addition to the Google link algorithm has been an attempt by Google to weed out sites that sell links. Google hates link selling! This is cheating their algorithm more than anything and webmasters should be very wary about selling or buying links.

Google wants things to be natural, not engineered! As soon as you start to trick the algorithm you start to risk a penalty and there will always be the possibility that what works to day will be punishable tomorrow.

3.43

after 7 Votes