At SearchFest, one of the speakers (Rand Fishkin) said this in his morning session “…it’s not a paid link. It’s just a link that you get when you pay money.”

I’m paraphrasing here, but it drew a laugh from the crowd because it’s completely true. We all know that Google does not like “paid links”, but they do draw a definite distinction and just because money changes hands does not necessarily make it “bad”.

When someone makes a contribution or donation to a charity, and then gets listed on a donor page, and that can be a very good link.

I have coached a boys baseball team each summer for nearly 10 years, and have recently become the webmaster for the league that my kids play for.

Just like every other year, I am struggling to find a team sponsor(s) to help cover the costs, get some additional equipment, and tournaments are $400+ a pop!

Anyway, last night at I attended a league board meeting, and I suggested that we incentivize our sponsorships a little further – i.e. – Not only put sponsor logos on the physical banner signage at the park, but that we also list them on the website for a full year and give them a link too.

That suggestion went over well, so it’s now in “full swing” – heh

Google says there is nothing wrong with this.

Remember, you’re not “buying a link”.  You’re making a tax deductible donation to a 501(c)3, which helps kids in the community, and the fact that you happen to be acknowledged with a link is just a byproduct of your generous donation.

If you’d like to buy a link  donate to a worthy cause, where you just happen to get a link too,  then follow the link below to arrange your desired anchor text contribution.

The payment  by check will be made to their 501(c)3

So…

Who wants to buy a link help a kids baseball league as a sponsor?

There are some amazing link research tools now available that can do a lot of work to find these types of links,  and the process has been talked about for years.

There’s also a great post at SEER interactive about finding other opportunities like this and another Point Blank SEO with some great query combos that are sure to get your imagination going with ideas.

I was asked to fill in at the off-site SEO session of SearchFest last week, and I worked for days on my slides, intending to give the best presentation that anyone had ever seen.

I tried to pack nearly 90 slides into a 25 minute presentation, and after the first half of the slides, I was already running out of time. I think I failed miserably at getting many of my points across, and for that I apologize profusely to all those in attendance.

I’ve posted the slides here, but taken out of context, without hearing my voice, it might appear that I’m advocating some shady methods. Let me assure you that I’m not.

If you want to see me give a similar presentation in it’s entirety, I’ll be doing so this month at my next Meetup on March 29th – “The Truth About Backlinks“.

At that meeting, I’ll not only be providing general details like I have in the slides below, but since I’ll have plenty of time, I’ll be expanding on some specific sites and tools we use to make the indexing job much easier.

Interested in attending my next Portland meetup?
Find out more here

I’m on the events planning committee for SEMpdx, and for the January 2011 meeting, I’m happy to announce that I’ll be one of the three presenters. If this seems a little self-serving, then I apologize, but I promise it will be a good one.

With the radical changes in Google that have taken place in the last two months, and considering this is still three weeks away, I’m not even positive what I’m going to speak about.

However, the other two presenters laid out their summations, so I gave it a shot.

As a somewhat “advanced” search professional, I grow tired of the plain-vanilla presentations that are designed to please 99% of the people out there, and offer very little actual “meat”.

My background is pretty diverse, and I was a Web host long before I was a full time Internet marketer, and Web hosting is a pretty spamming industry as far as what it takes to rank.

I work with a couple of clients who have major reputations to protect, and could NEVER risk being associated with some nefarious link building activity that could get their site banned.

I also work with a couple others who are less adverse to risk. They enjoy some success from skirting the edges of greyness, but still would very likely sue us if their domain were ever banned!

Finally, I’m an affiliate marketer, and that’s the most fun. When I own the domain personally, and am accountable to nobody else, I can not only skirt the edges, but I can ski right out of bounds. If my ticket gets pulled by Google, then it’s my own fault, and it would be a learning experience. (Sorry, my mind is elsewhere, since we’ve had 30 inches of snow in the past 48 hours)

Anyway, in my short session I hope to inform, educate, enlighten, and perhaps surprise a few people, as well as provide everyone with some actionable tips and awareness, so you can be aware of all the options.

Rereading this just now, it sounds like it could be good… Hope to see you there!

Simply put, a Link Wheel is a group of pages on different hosts, that are about a specific product, subject or service, which all link to each other, and also link to a particular URL, or “money site”.

Some call them “link wheels”, some call them “authority hubs”, and some, I’m sure, use names I haven’t even heard of.

One of the first advanced search marketing books I read was called Revenge of the MiniNet, by Michael Campbell. In a nutshell, this is the strategy it talked about:

Using multiple domains, build multiple niche websites that are very tightly focused about a specific aspect of your business.

In turn each of those websites would link to each other, and each of those websites would link back to your core URL

You might build multiple websites, one for each model of Sunbeam Toasters, and each of those websites would link to each other, and each of those websites would link back to your primary Sunbeam product page, or toaster page, or main domain, etc.

In doing this, you create relevant content rich mini-sites, that link to other mini sites, and to a central hub, which gets authority from the links within those domains.

The Problem?
The problem with that, was that besides being an awful lot of work, it was relatively transparent, and your new domains had no authority at all, so it took a long time before you might see the benefit.

Also, people were regularly going to great pains to register the domains under different name, host the domains at different IP addresses with multiple hosting accounts, and basically spent a ton of money trying to hide the fact that they were building their own web of links.

A Better Strategy
Jumping ahead to today, many people are doing the same process using some of the Web 2.0 content sites that are out there, which automatically removes most of those transparency factors by having all of the sites hosted on quality domains with lots of trust.

With all the talk about the importance of domain authority and trust, you must know that some domains carry an awful lot of extra weight. I’ve seen this linking strategy be quite effective over the past year, and I know people that have been doing it a lot longer than we have.

For Example:
For example, let’s say the goal is to increase rankings for “blue widgets”, to this URL – http://yourdomain.com/bluewidgets.html

• Create an account at Blogger, Tumbler, Knol, Slideshare, squidoo, Weebly, and Hubpages, to name just a few.
• Go through the process of building a lens, a hub, a blog, a mini-site, or whatever each of those entities decides to call it.
• Ensure that the subject of each one is entirely devoted to specific things to know about blue widgets.
• From each of those, be sure to link to one of the others, and be sure to link to your primary URL
• Be sure to use the anchor text, “blue widgets” as well as other similar variations.
• Be certain that the URL you are linking to is optimized for that particular phrase, with “blue widgets” in the title, header tag, alt tags etc.

There’s probably tons of content you could create, all the way from the history of blue widgets, to specific features, benefits, and even potential future evolution of the product.

The point is to create whatever they offer, and to put up a good piece of original content that actually has some stand-alone value. Do *NOT* be overly commercial, or put up duplicate garbage, or you will likely get your creation declined.

Some people call this “parasite hosting” but that sounds somehow unethical. I don’t believe this is “black hat” or even an “inappropriate” strategy at all, as long as you are providing value to the end reader.  After all, you’re going to get far more exposure at these web 2.0 properties, and educate far more people than you otherwise may, simply by posting on your own domain.

This strategy can be used to build multiple authority hubs to multiple areas of your site, and in 2009, it’s becoming more and more necessary to have these be tightly focused.

A true “widget baron” who is dominating the Internet will likely have multiple authority hubs for every color and style of widget, with their primary for that particular widget at the center of the wheel.

Outsource the process

*** December 20, 2009 – I’ve received reports of problems outsourcing to the company i was recommending, so i’ve removed them from here, and removed them from my SEO Toolbar too, until they improve their quality.

I’ve actually run across a business that specializes creating these Link Wheels far more economically than we could ourselves, and I just ordered yet another one, when I decided to write this post.

• All the user accounts are created using United States IP addresses
• All of the web properties are created by hand, with no automated software.
• All content is written by authors with a good command of English.
• All of the usernames and passwords provided for your profile completion and future content additions.

It’s really a no-brainer, and I can’t speak highly enough about how happy we’ve been with the quality o f  the stuff we’ve gotten from these guys…

Updated 11/10/2009 -

I’m revising my page, because after ordering a few of these, I realized that its’  NOT a “no brainer”,  and if you don’t pay attention, and provide them with good details, the quality will suffer.

I (incorrectly) assumed it went without saying here that you DO need to intelligently choose your anchor text and backlinks.

You also want to ensure that you have decent profiles, because you want maintain these properties later, if you’re not doing so monthly. You need it to actually “look” real, because it IS real!

It’s not some magic bullet that you only do once.   You have to add stuff,  and build them into true mini authority sites, developing trust.  Yes, you basically “fool” Google into thinking you’re a website that’s providing value by actually becoming one! 

Be sure whoever is building your link wheels is using a good name, good profile info, a good company description, a photo, a logo etc. and you’ll fare much better over the long haul.

Before you start giving your staff a hard time about not developing links at a faster pace, or you start sending out those link requests to potential “partners”, ask yourself what’s in it for them?

Obviously you can’t pay (gasp) someone to link to you, so what are you offering their visitors that would make it worth their while to link to you?

Are you offering something hilarious? Are you offering a free giveaway of some sort? Does your website have a valuable resource that they can’t do without?

I wrote a post last week that actually began as an e-mail to a client. I’ve placed it on the SEMpdx blog, and I do hope you’ll read it, and see if your imagination doesn’t become inspired.

It’s called Think Outside The Link and while you’re there reading it, I do hope you feel free to Digg, Stumble, and especially Sphinn it as much as you like, all at no additional charge

There’s been a nice addition to one of my favorite pieces of link building helper software with this morning’s update. It just keeps getting better and better to help your employees make their link building time actually count, and actually build a couple of links, instead of doing research.

1. Added: “Toggle Highlighting “NoFollow” Links” option.
2. Added: “Most Recent Post Date” column that shows the date of the most recent post on the blog. Some of the blogs most recent posts are over 2 years old. You can set a filter and remove blogs that haven’t had an entry since a selected date.

It’s all about the tools, and that’s why I endorse, support, and recommend Fast Blog Finder as an affiliate…

About a month ago I decided to try a new link building tool called Linkvana, and I wrote about it on my blog.

Now, about 30 days later, I AM still impressed. I HAVE seen ranking improvements, spidering frequency HAS improved, and all can be traced directly related to our LinkVana use, in my opinion.

Once again, I’ll repeat that this is NOT not a “total” solution, but it’s a DAMN good piece of pie for $149 a month. It’s like having a little vote out there, with proper link text back to the page of your choice.

I’m STILL not impressed with the PR or quality of most of the blogs, but it’s WORKING. For slightly longer tail phrases, (three or more words), and for “less competitive” ones (even one and two words, but with LESS than 2 million competing results) it’s really helped more than I even thought it would.

CAN Linkvana be abused, and used for evil? Sure, I guess so, but they’ll just kick you out, so why would you bother?

After about 5 weeks, I’m happy, I’m keeping it, and frankly, I’m TOTALLY surprised that it’s not sold out. I think it’s just one of those poorly promoted new programs, and with only 300 members to fill total, none of the “email blast gurus” figure it’s worth promoting on an affiliate basis.

Also, I’m finding that the 3 to 5 minutes per link to write the posts ourselves is tiresome, so I’m using the outsourcing they offer more and more too. At $2 apiece, it’s almost too easy, and all I have to do is choose the link text and landing pages I want.

Finally, I’ll say AGAIN, that it is NOT a cure-all, that can be the one answer to your linking woes, but just like a couple of aspirin, it sure helps make the headache tolerable.

And I;ll say again that this is NOT an automated black hat sort of thing. It’s up to YOU to intelligently disperse your incoming links with GOOD traffic phrases, that DO appear on the page you’re linking to, (or in the title tag ). That’s going to matter a LOT, and you’re going to kick some serious a** if done right, but it’s NOT going to be effective for link bombing unrelated pages. Got it?

In my opinion, anyone that builds links for multiple sites can be VERY well served by spending just a little time in LinkVana daily, assuming they know what they’re doing, and spread the link love to their internal deeper pages. You might want to try it yourself, before it’s too late.

You know the drill by now… Searching the web for subject relevant blogs, then posting an intelligent comment that you hope will get you a counted backlink to your own domain or webpage of your choice.

It’s a tedious process, but one that’s been proven effective for building backlinks and traffic. However, it takes an awful lot of time to not only find those blogs in the first place, but then evaluate the domain and the post to see if it’s even worth the effort to comment. That’s where this software comes in. ( Direct link to download the software demo)

The inclusion of the rel= “nofollow” tag on blog comments to prevent spam has made this practice less popular, but there are a large number of sites blogs out there that have removed the no follow attribute from their comments, and have started what i guess is called the “DoFollow” community.

Once you find a blog in your subject matter that allows followed comments, you can only do yourself so much good (link-wise) by participating, because it’s better to get multiple links from multiple domains. Besides, if you spend all your time commenting on just a couple of blogs you’ll become more of a stalker than a commenter!

Recently I received an e-mail about a new piece of software designed to help identify and locate blogs on which to comment almost effortlessly, and at first I was skeptical, expecting the majority of results to come back to me with nothing but junk.

However, after using it almost daily for nearly 3 weeks, I’m not only finding some real gems out there, but I’M ALSO seeing it add to my inbound link count and improve the related search rankings.

The software is called Fast Blog Finder, and it’s really simple to use.  You just enter a keyword or phrase in quotes, and the software searches the web for all of the blogs out there that allow comments, providing you with a link t othe blog, the page rank of the domain, the page rank of the actual post, the number of outbound links on the page, and the type of links it allows, either green (DO follow) or pink (no follow).

Instant column sorting lets me do a quick search for a phrase, sort by type of link, and then instantly read and comment right inside the software, or in a web browser if I prefer.

Once a comment is submitted, the software automatically adds a note for future reference, so you can see that you’ve commented there before.

A typical search for a phrase may come up with several hundred blogs, a couple dozen posts that allow Dofollow commenting, and just a handful that have actual page rank on the post page. The amount of time it saves is almost immeasurable.

Obviously, the idiots out there will abuse this software and attempt to make pointless comments with nothing but keyword rich name links, forcing the blog owners to delete their comments as spam. DO NOT DO THAT!

But if you use your head, and leave a thoughtful and relevant comment, linking back to your site, your page, or your clients site, then there is no reason the blog owner will not approve the comment, and the backlink will be a good one.

When I first saw this software I was pretty impressed, and now that I’ve seen some actual ranking bumps and inbound links increase for brand-new domains, I’m even more impressed.

There’s a completely  free version of the software you can download here, and I would encourage you to give it a try, even though it only returns 50 results in the free version.  You will still likely come up with some DoFollowed links the you can create instantly and almost effortlessly.

Another great feature is the fact that once the report has been run, you can export the entire list into an Excel (.csv) spreadsheet, and pass it along to an employee to work on over a period of time.

That’s great, because you cannot run this software on multiple computers without an individual license for EACH user. That’s worth noting. If you have a stable of employees, and you want THEM to do the research, then you’re going to have to buy a version for each one of them.  However, at only $49 a pop, I can tell you that the time saved will be well worth the investment.

I’m spending less than 10 minutes each morning taking the time to post just one link for one of my own domains, but I’ve sent spread sheets and assigned the task to a couple of Search Commander associates, and I give this software a wholehearted thumbs up.

It’s totally white hat, totally useful, and I cannot imagine doing the job without this software any more. If you want to see how much time you can save, here are a couple of links… (and yes, of COURSE they’re affiliate links!)

Trial Version
Main Website

Please comment here with your thoughts…

There is no single magic bullet for search engine visibility. However, there is a process that acts as an entire arsenal of magic bullets, and those are structure, content and links.

• Search engine friendly structure and fundamentally sound SEO principals.
• Fresh content appropriately added on a regular basis commensurate to the level of your competitions activity.
• Inbound links from relevant sites with appropriate anchor text to targeted areas of your website appropriately balanced to the level of your competition.

Anything else that I can think of pretty much falls within those three bullets, and assuming you understand them all, I’ll proceed.

*Updated 12/31 – I’m sticking with the Linkvana test but I’m adding to the reader comment area below – Be sure to read them – Is Linkvana black hat, grey hat, white hat or what? I guess that’s going to be controversial, but I can assuredly say it “definitely aint squeaky clean”!

Structure
If you have a well optimized site structure, (like a properly configured WordPress site) that will take care of bullet number one, the structure..Content
Well-written content designed for the readers to provide some value is all it takes. Between your friends, your kids, your employees, ghostwriters, and even content spinners, that takes care of bullet two.

Links
When it comes to inbound links, you already understand that above all else you need quantity, but you also need diversity, and you need quantity.

Quality Link Building
Quality link building is a skill unto itself, and for competitive phrases there is simply no substitute.

This is not the place to get into great detail, but it shouldn’t be news to you that some links are better than others. The best quality inbound links are ones that are relevant to your business, ones that come from domains and pages that have Google page rank, and have limited numbers of outbound links.

I’d rather have an inbound link from a related PR3 page with only five other outbound links, than a link on a PR7 page with a couple of hundred other links. I wish I could tell you I had a solution to get the most authoritative and relevant websites on the web to link to you but I don’t, and anyone who tells you that is lying.

Inbound Link Diversity
To add to your diversity, Web directories and article directories can be worked to death. Additionally, your own participation in blogs and social media will bring you incredible value, and you’re only limited by your available time in the day.

Perhaps you’ve purchased links from foreign countries, or you’ve tried some of the link networks that require that a script get added to your site to slowly build links through other participants sites over time.These may still be fine for affiliate sites, but you can’t risk having an important domain dropped from the index, and simply change domain names on the fly if one gets caught violating Google’s terms of service.

To add your diversity, you also may have found networks of blogs both small and large, perhaps through someone you know, or even a commercial service that allow you to post content on their blogs which are on a wide array of C class IP addresses, choosing your own link text.

This has proven to be one of the most effective methods of gathering links in volume, but can still require a Herculean effort on your part (i.e. work), and eventually, you’ll exhaust the supply of available domains, and you’re left with nothing but those 10, 20 or even 50 domains to build links to your sites.

Even More Diversity
If you’re lazy, or you’ve been in the game for a while, then perhaps you’ve used, or at least you understand, about things like content scrapers and trackback and comment spam.

While both used to work, (and perhaps still do to a point), they can really leave you with a bad taste in your mouth, and definitely constitute a big black hat.

Inbound Link Quantity
Unlike trying to rank for “Las Vegas real estate”, many second and third tier phrases still really don’t need a whole lot of effort to dominate the search rankings.

If you’re selling “decorative blue locking widgets” and have a well optimized page for them, then just a few inbound text links can rocket you to the top of the search engines, and that’s where Linkvana comes in.

Here are the steps to using Linkvana:

• Add a new project
• Add your domain
• Choose your target URLs
• Choose your anchor text
• Make 100 word posts with those phrases
• You’re off to the races…

The Linkvana network will then add your articles (posts) with your backlink to trickle in daily over time. It’s as close as you can get to a “set it and forget it” system.

They insist on quality original content, and limit the number of posts yoy can make each day PER DOMAIN. However, there’s no limit to the number of domains, and that’s huge.

They do offer about 40 minutes of video training on the site, and I’ve watched it all, boiling it down to a 3 1/2 minute demonstration , which I started immediately after creating a new project in their system – Linkvana Demo Video.

After a couple of weeks, I’ll follow up with the results too, as I’ve begun testing with multiple domains that currently have no backlinks, and no ranking of any kind. Some of my first links just went live yesterday, so have not yet been discovered by the search engines.

The only “downside” that I’ve encountered so far is that since it’s a closed network, there is no way of knowing where your post and links are going to end up.

However, that same fact is what prevents this network from being easily discoverable, and ultimately penalized somehow. I just don’t see it happening. I suppose it’s technically possible that someone could research all the backlinks manually as they trickle in, and then be able to determine what blogs are participating in this network, but that seems to me to be an incredible amount of work for such a small number of users (300), and highly unlikely.

There’s a certain amount of trust involved on my part too, that the links will really happen as they claim. However, the names that are involved with this venture and those of participants are well known, and I’m comfortable giving it a try.

Again, let me stress that this is NOT going to be a complete substitute for true authoritative link building, and enable you to instantly rank for the highest competition phrases.

However, in my opinion (*ed. – see latest comments below), when added to your arsenal, Linkvana is definitely going to be a big gun to use for ranking many of your medium and longer tail phrases in a snap, assuming all of your other bullets are in place too.

They’re currently running a $50 off promotion, but I don’t know how long that will be good, and they claim that the cutoff for membership is 300 people. I was number 188.

If you decide to check it out, I hope you’ll use my (of course) affliate link and leave me some feedback about how it goes.

Good links are hard to come by, but if you throw enough against the wall, something always sticks.

By regularly submitting to web directories, making sure your blog is pinging news services, submitting your RSS feeds, submitting content to article directories, and even by linking to your own internal pages with good anchor text, you’re going to continue to grow those inbound links.

“Rented” links are another story, and Google’s position is that paid links are definitely bad. They are aggressively fighting to identify and devalue any inbound links that are determined to be paid, and they are penalizing sites that are selling the links.There’s no denying that it still works, because they can’t catch everything, but as time goes on, they’ll catch more and more. For now, there are still too many ways to “fly under the radar” and they can’t possibly catch them all, but if you’ve been buying your links, it’s time to consider a more long term strategy.

What Google can do, and what they ARE doing, is “penalizing” websites that are selling links without the nofollow tag, and they are penalizing them by lowering their green toolbar PageRank.

At this point, Google has not yet lowered these sites rankings, but in my opinion, this was sort of a warning shot across the bow to warn those selling links that they should stop, or that’s next.

I’ve personally paid for links for my own sites before, and some even on a monthly basis, because I believe they have value in the traffic they might bring. It’s a safe bet that if Google “catches” those sites selling links, then any value they have for my ranking will be removed, if it hasn’t been already.

In my opinion, Google can never penalize someone for buying links. Otherwise, an entire cottage industry would pop up buying links for your competition. Instead, what Google does is devalue an inbound link that they determine to be paid and put in place only for ranking purposes.

I believe that the way that they devalue the juice of an inbound link is not by devaluing the link itself, but by devaluing the overall PageRank of the site that is passing along the link to you – i.e. – that makes your link worth a bit less.

The bottom line is that without some sort of link building going on, you’re just not going to be pulling ahead of the competition, and you have to try everything within the Webmaster guidelines.

It’s also extremely important to build links to many different pages on your website, and with many different variations of anchor text too. There’s never a reason to focus all of your link building activity on a single web page, or with identical anchor text. When a site naturally acquires links, they come in all different flavors, to different areas of the site. The key to success is to appear “natural”, so be sure to diversify tour targets and your anchor text accordingly.

Linking to others, commenting (intelligently) on forums and blogs, writing great content of your own, and creating useful tools are only a few ways you can make links happen. Here are a few other link building ideas that might spur your imagination…

The entire search engine marketing industry is quaking in fear and speculation as you read this, and the organic ranking of many sites is now subject to penalty at Google’s whim.

The debate over paid links seems to be coming to a frenzied head this summer, especially since the SES San Jose paid links session called “Are Paid Links Evil?” in August.

It’s been nearly six full months since a Google Toolbar PageRank update now, and some people have speculated that this might even be the end of the green bar as we know it.

Webmasters are now reporting drops in ranking, and insiders at Google seem to be confirming that yes, not only are they trying to discount the value of paid links and the ranking benefit they may impart, but they are actually penalizing the organic search ranking of sites that sell links.

As of Friday, the official word from Google came down that selling links on your site can lead to a penalty. The key work there is “CAN”, because it’s not happening to everyone equally.

To fully understand what is going on and how this is changing the industry right before our very eyes, you really need to grab a cup of coffee and spend some time reading these three articles by Jennifer Laycock.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Okay, now that you’ve read those, you must have your own opinion, right? Well here’s mine…

This is total crap. The hypocrisy of Google “allowing” link sales and even spammy doorway pages from sites like Forbes, while penalizing the small site for making a few bucks is ridiculous. Even when BMW got penalized they were right back in a few days.

Cronyism and antitrust issues aside, the “FUD factor” – creating Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt - (as seen in Michael Gray’s SES San Jose presentatoion) seems to be the only weapon Google has at their disposal for influencing the behavior of te majority of Webmasters and in many cases, it’s working.

Way back in 2004, Jeremy Zawodny from Microsoft mentioned the “… increasingly PageRank driven advertising economy…” and the writing was on the wall even then. Has nobody at Google seen this coming?

By being based so heavily on a VISIBLE commodity, (the green PR bar) their search algorithm is flawed, and Google is powerless to stop it any other way.

Sure, they can identify the big networks that many of us have come to know and use, and those can and should be filtered out of the algorithm to improve the integrity of the search results. You can’t begrudge them that, since it’s their search engine and they should be able to do what they want.

Unfortunately, the hypocrisy factor is heavy, and in our world, money talks. Picking on the small guys while leaving the big sites unscathed seems to be acceptable. If Google had any real commitment to search integrity they would be applying this penalty evenly, but that’s just not the way the world works, I guess.

In my opinion the only thing that makes sense at this point is for Google to to remove the green PageRank indicator from the toolbar.

Even if that was just a temporary solution, while they continue to improve the algorithm, that would effectively shut down any incentive to buy links almost immediately.

As I said in my post a couple of weeks ago, asking if this was the end of visible PageRank…

“if you don’t want someone to sell something, then don’t consistently tell them how much it’s worth.”

After what many are calling the best SES session, Matt Cutts was caught on camera physically expressing his feelings about the way he was treated, as he attempted to strangle Graywolf!

During his portion of the session, Michael Gray attacked Google pretty viciously, but did so in a methodical and logical way that was nearly impossible to disagree with.

I’d never seen Matt actually squirm before, and being in the front row, I could swear I saw sweat on his brow. I actually did feel bad for him, but he really was placed in an indefensable positition.

I think the height of utter hypocracy was best demonstrated when Todd Malicoat showed a screenshot of a Google search for “buy text links”, and everyone in the audiience could see that Google was profiting from the very activity they publicly condemn.

Next to pile on were Todd Friesen and then Greg Boser, who both laid out their cases very matter of factly, and again, barely a sylable could be debated.

The only hope of salvation came from Andy Baio, who is the founder of Upcoming & Waxy but his point was basically that people SHOULD be nice and not to cheat. Well, yeah, that’s true, but teachers should get paid more than basketball players, and thats just not the way the world works, is it?

The writeups on this session were incredible, and you can read all the gory details as captured impeccably by Tamar Weinberg of Search Engine Round Table, Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz and Lisa Barone from Bruce Clay. Dana Larsen at Top Rank Blog also has some insight worth reading, with a funny analogy.

I predict that this session may actually lead to the death of (visible) PageRank in the Google toolbar, but there’s not much they can do about the algorithm’s dependancy on inbound links, or the publics desire to trade green paper for green pixels.

The attack? – Well, Matt and Michael were just joking around…

The picture was shot by Mark Knowles, from Smart Solutions, a Bend Oregon web development company, and I’d better make it clear that no money changed hands in exchange for the picture, or for any of these links