Do Run Of Site Links Work?

[Dave Hawley]

They have that text on the side of their black stealth helicopter

[Mel]

Originally Posted by seobook

should read:
Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful, while profiting by delivering targeted advertisements near the information.

Given the fact that 98% of thier income is from "contextual advertising" (isn't it nice how they can dream up this kind of obfuscation rather that just saying PPC ads?) could it be that this is the real focus of Google and all those engineers are not working on ways to build a better organic search, but instead are working on ways to make Adwords even more profitable?

[seobook]

Originally Posted by Mel

Given the fact that 98% of thier income is from "contextual advertising" (isn't it nice how they can dream up this kind of obfuscation rather that just saying PPC ads?) could it be that this is the real focus of Google and all those engineers are not working on ways to build a better organic search, but instead are working on ways to make Adwords even more profitable?

the illusion of a much better search technology is necissary to build the network to make AdWords more profitable though.

[Mel]

So I guess the Public Relations people work on the illusion, which the engineers work on Adwords?

[Dave Hawley]

illusion

Never knew Google did illusions.

How dare Google profit from running the most popular SE on the planet. How dare they send me so much paying traffic via free inclusion and AdWords.

seobook, if you have a site, I take it you have a robots.text file telling Google not to index any pages of your site?

[glengara]

*Glengara are you saying that you manually checked those 139,000 links and verified that all are relevant (to the search term ) anchor text links?*

Thought I'd leave that for someone who is either unfamiliar with the internet.commerce network, or wishes to desperately clutch at straws ;-)

[dannysullivan]

I think I might, though it may not be popular here.

While looking at some of the directories that advertise on the internet.commerce network, I thought I'd look at how some of the other advertisers were doing.

Thought I'd clear up this reference -- it's about the little internet.commerce links that show up in the left-hand side of the page.

These are links Jupitermedia, which publishes this site, runs across all the sites it operates.

I've posted about this program before, but here's some additional background:

1) It predates Google and the heavy use of link analysis by search engines. IE, it wasn't designed as a way for people to build up links for search ranking purposes.

2) Jupiter tells me it is specifically not sold as a means of getting better rankings on Google.

I don't handle the program -- it's an ad thing, and I deal with only editorial. However, I can say anyone considering it should measure against my threegolden rules of link building, the key one in this case being:

Rule 2 - Buy links if visitors that come solely from the link will justify the cost

Personally, I'm not surprised if the sites in those boxes aren't ranking well for those terms. It's fairly easy for a search engine to see that the same link, with the same anchor text, may appear on hundreds of pages and decide to discount the weight of those links. Not ban! Not hurt! Just not give the links as much credit as if there were hundreds of links to a site with variety to anchor text and domain locations.

[I, Brian]

Originally Posted by Dave Hawley

At last, someone has posted some common sense instead of common belief!

No - it's part of common belief. Or - at least - the idea of targeting links from a wide spread of IP ranges, rather than just links from one domain, has been a constant mantra at v7n:

Getting keyword rich inbound links from many different sites (from various IP ranges) is the single best way to improve your Google rankings.

- Aaron Wall
Best selling author, SEO book
www.seobook.com



Link building is indeed the way to top rankings. Getting links with the right anchor text is the key to SEO. But - here's the secret - it's not the number of links per se, but the number of unique domains and IP's that are linking to you.

- John Scott
Creator of Bluefind Directory and the v7n webmaster community.

It is also a foundation policy in a lot of commercial link building work.

However, link building isn't always about numbers within a site, or numbers across an IP range. Links are not all created equally.

But as to the original question - "Do Run Of Site Links Work?" - sure they do. But they are not necessarily going to be very effective in isolation.

The linking benefits from a single site are generally regarded as limited, but can build up.

[glengara]

* Not ban! Not hurt! Just not give the links as much credit..*

I'd agree with that, with one proviso.

IMO, G sees RoS links as a potential "links scheme", and which particular view is taken of them seems to depend on whether other "links schemes" are in play.