Over the last few months, Google has been putting a lot of effort into cleaning up link spam. Matt Cutts the public face of Google even asked for examples of unethical link tactics, so they can test a new algorithm designed to devalue links.
Whether a new spam filter was used or a manual clear up took place, dozens of prominent sites in competitive sectors have been demoted or removed entirely for specific search terms – usually those where ‘anchor text’ had been unnaturally inflated.
This post isn’t really about the rights and wrongs of link brokers and add networks, but more about the factors that drive webmasters and marketeers resort to such tactics.
One of the main benefits of mass link acquisition is not PageRank, topical relevance or trust, but good old fashion anchor text. Google’s reliance on the language contained within inbound links puts prominent brands at a huge disadvantage. Brands are rarely named after the product they represent, hence they will always have problems ranking in Google for there product-category terms. The more prominent your brand, the less reason to describe what you represent in the link text.
I’m amazed that after all these years, Google use this crude factor in determining relevance. If this was discarded, I’m convinced that a lot of link spam would disappear, or at least evolve to something else. As semantic analysis becomes more sophisticated, I really can’t see a reason for factoring anchor text.
