Since I started messing with sites, I quickly saw that
black and white techniques were not precisely defined.
Yeah, white is doing websites without using manipulation
techniques to inflate their rankings, and black is the
opposite. Simple hey, well not really. There's been
discussions on lots of forums and it seems like
black-hat is basically what the competition does to
outrank you.When I first made a site, the guy who
showed me said to put words here and there... it was
helping in the rankings. At the time, google was still
doing the monthly dances and I was never in the serps,
so why not.
With time, reading forums, I learned the different ways to increase my
rankings, with onpage spam and stuff. But, after getting
destroyed by the Florida update, I revised my way of
doing things, to be white for sure.
I cleaned my stuff and made my sites white and all,
according to what was white at this time. Kept the
existing links exchange I had, just did not put more on
them link pages, and stopped making link pages on my
sites. Then, pages named links started to disappear from
the link: command list, that would show only the juicy
PR4 and more backlinks. Some sites stopped passing PR...
The Florida update was to fix onpage abuse, now they
were moving onto off-page manipulation or links if you
prefer. Were my sites still white ? After Google
started hitting pages that were named links.xyz, they
also trashed the value of signature links in forums. My
site was a PR6 at the time but took a nosedive, losing
all those forum sig links. The fun part was, my
links.html still showed as a backlink for the pages of
my site itself, so I let it be, cause it would be a good
metric for me. Later, google mashed the link: command
and made it display just a sample of the low PR and
internal pages linking to the target page. Easy to see
google was trying to clean the links that were maybe not
of great quality. No wonder they messed the link:
command up, or we would have been able to see what they
were doing. I had time to see the links.xyz pages being
booted out before they messed the link: command, showing
they moving on the link hunt. People started the 3-way
link exchanges to better hide the links they were
getting, but this would give a nice flower shape if you
made lines from sites to sites on a sheet, or a sphere
if you fancy to imagine it in 3-D. And then, the rel="nofollow"
was thrown into the mix. It was introduced to fix the
tons of links that were posted on blogs, forums where
links were not all by the webmaster. Using rel="nofollow"
in the link would tell the search engines that the link
were not trusted, and were not to be followed or
considered as a vote. They then decided to make it a
rule to use it on ads or sold links, so I dropped the
sold links I had on my site. Now, am I still white? It
easy to see that links are it, for the anchor and/or PR.
Maybe they cut the PR to kill the anchor weight, but PR
has it's meaning in the equation still, I'm pretty sure.
Why make a big deal and cut PR on pages for selling PR
links if it's a futile metric. Anyway, lately lots of
sites dropped in PR, directory got a beating and may
have a part in this drop, beside the load of link pages
that got grey PR. I dropped the few link pages I had
from the old days, they were grey anyway and were also
supplemental to make them even better. Only my very old
site still had fit link pages. So it's hard to be sure
you are doing white-hat stuff. As time passed, what was
white became black-hat techniques, cause penalizing a
page for selling a link is saying just that. Not sure
who will risk linking to other resources without a
nofollow now. I know I'm not going to risk getting hit
because a link is followed and just stop linking out
period. Beside my directory, I only had 2 sites with
links to other sites, not a big deal. But again, can I
be sure my techniques and sites are white-hat now... not
knowing the rules Google use, I can't be sure... but
beside deleting my sites, I don't think they could get
any whiter... lol |
