Trust and Linking
It is funny, the more things change, the more they stay the same. In the “early” days of the WWW, the vast majority of users with techies and they all abided by certain unwritten rules. Since the web has gone mainstream, many of those “rules” have fallen by the wayside. Today, it seems that people are determined to live by the capitalist principles of anything goes. The web is fast becomming just like everything else here in the United States…which is good and bad. Money is fast becomming the way to influence things and the days of knowing more than the next guy making you rich are becomming a thing of the past. Of course, technological innovation will always make people money, but money is the great equalizer.
So, to get to my real point about trust and linking. The more things change the more they stay the same. Back in the “early” days of SEO, before it was called that, altavista started what they called, “link popularity”. You could check to see how many other sites pointed to yours with a command. Back then, most people did not really care about it, but still tried to get links or reciprocal links pointing back to their sites. Soon, that fell by the wayside as content seemed to really dictate how the SE’s would rank your site. Well, Page Rank changed all of that and the “voting” system has become a major part of how all SE’s rank sites. Yahoo! and MSN have seriously changed the way they rank sites, to include link popularity, to catch up with Google in the search engine wars.
December 22nd, 2004 at 11:45 pm
I remember the old days when you felt like you knew the people you are networking with. Now everyone has caught on. I started seo in 1999. Is funny to see how now people talk about link exchange like it’s the hot new thing.
What is bad is when new seo’s try to be slick. Very often old seo’s will take advantage of that attitude and abuse it with their fake link directories.
I’ve met some real dipshits online but they normally get what they deserve…absolutely nothing.
my new rule is, if a site is quality, the webmaster is most likely a serious standup person.
All the focus on PR and so on means nothing if they give you a lot of hassle about placing you on actually a page with some PR and it is not worth the headache.
What goes around comes around …