Recently Matt Cutts came up with a blog where he referred to some newspaper site that complained of their page rank going down from seven to three. The main reason behind the drop was that someone filed a spam report against the newspaper site as they were trying to sell links from this website. On his statement, Matt Cutts said that usually a site’s pagerank can go down by thirty to fifty percent if the site violates the quality guidelines through selling links which pass pagerank. The ranking of a website is basically based on the websites that links to it. The quantity, relevance and quality of back links definitely counts towards the rating of any website. The sites linking to any website can provide the basic matter and context of that site while indicating its popularity and quality.
There are several websites that try to violate the guidelines of Google webmaster by using black-hat SEO techniques like cloaking, keyword stuffing, participating in the link schemes and deliberate duplicate content creation. A lot of webmasters have been found getting engaged in the process of link exchange options and building partner pages just for performing cross-linking. They thoroughly disregard the standard of links and how it can affect their website’s pagerank in future. The links which tend to manipulate the ranking of a site in Google is considered a part of linking scheme. There different instances of various link schemes that can have adverse affect on the ranking of a site. Some samples of the link schemes are:
- Selling or buying links which pass pagerank including links exchanged for money or even posts containing links; exchanging services or goods for links; or sending some person a ‘free’ product and in exchange making the person write about it and also including the link.
- Linking to unrelated sites or web spammers with the intention of manipulating the pagerank.
- Too much link exchanging
- Using automated services or programs for creating links in a site
- Building partner pages solely for the motive of cross-linking
Buying links is definitely not a part of SEO instead links should be earned by creating unique and quality content for the site. The more relevant the content of the website, the greater are the chances of somebody else finding it relevant for the readers and linking to it. Page rank can be prevented from passing by adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the <a> tag and by redirecting links to some intermediate page which is blocked from respective search engines by the robot.txt file. Before taking any kind of decision it is vital for webmasters to understand whether the content of the website will benefit the visitors. Creating unique, relevant and quality content for the site always pays off. Sites that are natural tend to grow gradually but continue to grow with the passage of time. However, artificial sites tend to generate content quickly but gradually slow down with the passage of time.