Assorted Thoughts on Website Buying, Selling and Monetizing

Greywolf talks in his blog post about a webmaster who followed the Google mantra of "Product great content and people will link to you".

He produced great content. Visitors came in large numbers. They didn't link.

And I'm noticing that increasingly on several sites. People just don't seem to be linking to great content like they used to. It may be because there's so much of content out there, because of webmaster fears of "PR leaking", because a destination's content may change and your site could get penalised for linking to a bad neighbour, or one of the million other reasons.

When people do link, they now tend to use nofollow to play it safe. The whole linking system got spammed to death - and completely unreliable - since Google decided to use links as a basis of deciding quality. So they can't still be using it, right?

Some maintain that the whole system of deciding quality destinations by the links they get is ...broken.

My Google front page is now stuffed with all kinds of unwanted results that weren't there a few years ago - I get links to youtube videos, Google's cache of images etc. These occupy a limited space that hasn't expanded to accommodate all these extras. If ten quality sites were getting to the front page a few years ago, now it's down to about five. Even those aren't selected purely on quality ...or even links - Google's personalisation and geo-targeting of results "corrupt" the quality refining.

Are we right to still believe that Google line about quality content getting links and links moving you to the top of the SERPS? Is is still about quality content getting to #1? If you challenge Google about it, apparently, they have no solid evidence for their claim.

Is it all just propaganda?