Fused Nation – UK SEO Blog

Well not devalued as such, as they haven’t been of a great value for a while – but time was, sheer quantity of links would get you to where you are going.

In a recent uber post, Matt Cutts has touched on the subject several times in relation to the feedback from the recently bigdaddy rollout.

Linking to a free ringtones site, an SEO contest, and an Omega 3 fish oil site? I think I’ve found your problem. I’d think about the quality of your links if you’d prefer to have more pages crawled. As these indexing changes have rolled out, we’ve improving how we handle reciprocal link exchanges and link buying/selling.

Then:

This time, I’m seeing links to mortgages sites, credit card sites, and exercise equipment. I think this is covered by the same guidance as above; if you were getting crawled more before and you’re trading a bunch of reciprocal links, don’t be surprised if the new crawler has different crawl priorities and doesn’t crawl as much.

Closing with:

Some folks that were doing a lot of reciprocal links might see less crawling. If your site has very few links where you’d be on the fringe of the crawl, then it’s relatively normal that changes in the crawl may change how much of your site we crawl.

Being a simple minded non-tech guy I always kinda assumed that the crawl process was a simple “let’s grab it all and sort the shit out back at the ‘plex”.  But clearly I was wrong.

I’m not sure crawl depth has been affected by inbound link quality / type in the past, but this change, allbeit a subtle one, will have quite an impact.  Designed to target (or rather, ignore) short term, artificial link building campaigns this will be a great way for Google to side step a huge part of the SEO industry – particularly MFA sites, low content affiliate sites, etc etc.

Think about the model of such a site – large amount of pages, low amount of links (or x amount of low quality links).  This is not the model of a site that is organically developing (as people simply don’t know build crap links if they aren’t SEOs!).

However I know of a client who’s been with an SEO agency for a while now – they have a large site that is growing fast since launch and were recently impacted by these bigdaddy changes.  They definitely aren’t spamming – they have lot’s of orginial content (over 60 individuals writing unique content for the site) – they are just dwindling due to Crap Link Syndrome (I’m going to coin the abbreviation CLS! ).  Not really their fault now?

MG