Greenguy's Board - View Single Post

CaptainJSparrow · 2012-03-31, 02:14 PM

I can't really speak for anyone other than myself and the free site owners that I knew back in the days, from about 1996 to 1999, we used to get paid ahead of time by the big sponsors. Of course, some tried to shave, but we always came to an agreement. For my sites, we had our own counters of outgoing traffic and the clients usually went with our numbers. We started out making about two cents per click and when it got competitive we were getting fourteen cents'ish. At that time, none of the sponsors that I worked with had the programs to specifically determine whether the traffic made them money or not. That said, they would do tests and when we would send traffic their sales went up significantly...most of the time.

Google did always value higher pr links, but massive quantities of links (even low quality ones) could get a site higher in the serps.

With Link Lists, the whole point of requiring the submitters to submit their pages to other Link Lists (most LL's required a table with other popular LL's in the table) was to have those pages get page rank, and traffic, from the other Link Lists in the hopes that those pages would increase your Link List's page rank and placement in the serps. Some folks would try to create a page specifically for your LL to see what type of traffic they were getting from you...the LL owners frowned upon this and would even black list those folks.

The moral of the story though, IMHO, is that model of the Link List was created as a form of link bait to get back links for the purpose of getting your LL ranked higher in the serps. Everything was aimed at that, even the modifications that came about from the LL owners such as requiring the submitter to submit to other lists (otherwise they would only be getting your pr and you wanted them to get pr from the other lists and send it to you), having tertiary pages for each of your categories (to avoid direct page to page reciprocal linking), etc.

Unfortunately, what it turned into over time was a group of Link Lists that linked to thousands of pages on a domain (actually often on multiple domains owned by the same person), those thousands of pages linking back to the Link List on each of the pages with a redundant table that had a link to both the index page and the category page, the majority of the Link Lists interlinking all of their category and index pages with the other Link Lists, and invariably those Link Lists interlinking with any other good sites that folks could find and then everyone else would see the link and get one too.

Hence, a big cluster fuck of interlinked pages that exists to this day that Google has penalized the hell out of. Think of what is out there, just from the examples that I posted earlier in this thread. Thousands of old pages from years ago, that have a grey bar for page rank...this means that Google does not value these pages at all. They are considered a bad neighborhood.

Hence, if you are a webmaster that submitted to the Link Lists and you have hundreds or thousands of these grey barred pages on your domain, then you will never get significant Google traffic to that domain, as long as you keep those pages up, because those old bad pages make Google consider your domain a bad neighborhood.

If you own a Link List and you still have links to those old pages somewhere on your domain then you are linking to a bad neighborhood and have a penalty. Also, if your Link List has too many links from those old pages, you have a penalty for that.

Google caught on to this scheme to artificially inflate your sites position in the serps years ago and there is just no way for these sites (the hub domains of the submitters and the Link Lists) to get out of that penalty until a decent percentage of those pages are deleted off the servers and the Link Lists delete their old pages that have the links to those bad pages.

2012-03-31, 02:14 PM	#25
CaptainJSparrow You can now put whatever you want in this space :) Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: Louisiana Posts: 511	I can't really speak for anyone other than myself and the free site owners that I knew back in the days, from about 1996 to 1999, we used to get paid ahead of time by the big sponsors. Of course, some tried to shave, but we always came to an agreement. For my sites, we had our own counters of outgoing traffic and the clients usually went with our numbers. We started out making about two cents per click and when it got competitive we were getting fourteen cents'ish. At that time, none of the sponsors that I worked with had the programs to specifically determine whether the traffic made them money or not. That said, they would do tests and when we would send traffic their sales went up significantly...most of the time. Google did always value higher pr links, but massive quantities of links (even low quality ones) could get a site higher in the serps. With Link Lists, the whole point of requiring the submitters to submit their pages to other Link Lists (most LL's required a table with other popular LL's in the table) was to have those pages get page rank, and traffic, from the other Link Lists in the hopes that those pages would increase your Link List's page rank and placement in the serps. Some folks would try to create a page specifically for your LL to see what type of traffic they were getting from you...the LL owners frowned upon this and would even black list those folks. The moral of the story though, IMHO, is that model of the Link List was created as a form of link bait to get back links for the purpose of getting your LL ranked higher in the serps. Everything was aimed at that, even the modifications that came about from the LL owners such as requiring the submitter to submit to other lists (otherwise they would only be getting your pr and you wanted them to get pr from the other lists and send it to you), having tertiary pages for each of your categories (to avoid direct page to page reciprocal linking), etc. Unfortunately, what it turned into over time was a group of Link Lists that linked to thousands of pages on a domain (actually often on multiple domains owned by the same person), those thousands of pages linking back to the Link List on each of the pages with a redundant table that had a link to both the index page and the category page, the majority of the Link Lists interlinking all of their category and index pages with the other Link Lists, and invariably those Link Lists interlinking with any other good sites that folks could find and then everyone else would see the link and get one too. Hence, a big cluster fuck of interlinked pages that exists to this day that Google has penalized the hell out of. Think of what is out there, just from the examples that I posted earlier in this thread. Thousands of old pages from years ago, that have a grey bar for page rank...this means that Google does not value these pages at all. They are considered a bad neighborhood. Hence, if you are a webmaster that submitted to the Link Lists and you have hundreds or thousands of these grey barred pages on your domain, then you will never get significant Google traffic to that domain, as long as you keep those pages up, because those old bad pages make Google consider your domain a bad neighborhood. If you own a Link List and you still have links to those old pages somewhere on your domain then you are linking to a bad neighborhood and have a penalty. Also, if your Link List has too many links from those old pages, you have a penalty for that. Google caught on to this scheme to artificially inflate your sites position in the serps years ago and there is just no way for these sites (the hub domains of the submitters and the Link Lists) to get out of that penalty until a decent percentage of those pages are deleted off the servers and the Link Lists delete their old pages that have the links to those bad pages.