Quote:
Originally Posted by OldWelshGuy
What you are doing is a classic link farm (sorry) If you are doing this for traffic only I suggest you block the pages from google.
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I realize we are getting into a vague "gray" area but I disagree with your remark that BungeeBones is a "link farm". I fully understand your concern, as I wrote an article in my blog quite some time ago about that very subject.
Income Producing Link Exchange
Whether one tries to appease Google or not, to me, seems to be a matter of odds and probability of achieving a given SERP rating for a given category. In my post I mentioned my chosen keyword (real estate). It was a real estate advertising site. IT would have been starting out at 360 million and one. If I beat out 99.9999999 % of the competition I would be on the first page. Take a point off the last decimal and I would be in the top 20. Quite frankly, I would have better odds investing in the lotto.
But the thing that really bothers me is the vagueness of their definition of what constitutes "link farms". Is it really just a case of fear mongering?
My goal with BungeeBones is to make it such a high quality directory as to actually be used by the search engines as they do with DMOZ. The entire reason they value links in their algorithms is because of the human review factor anyway. BungeeBones is and always will be human reviewed links only. PLUS, I incorporated features for other webmasters to review websites also as well as the public.
Don't assume I don't know the typical SEO response to my argument, which is to simply "niche" my site by aiming at a less popular keyword. I understand the principle that it is real easy to rank #1 for a keyword such as "purchasing real estate on a Tuesday" or some other bizarre thing. But when one is in a keyword dominated by multinational corporations then the chance of the "average Joe" getting to the top is slim to none.
Ultimately, though, it is up to the webmaster that hosts the subscription directory on their own site whether to stop Google or not. Personally I don't have a problem with that and there is no policy against it but every webmaster that submits their link in the directory loses when they do.