On December 16th Google’s Stefanie Ulrike Dürr published a blog post discussing ‘Building link-based popularity’ on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog. This resource uses the tagline ‘Official news on crawling and indexing sites for the Google index’. Now, that should grab your attention .

What it’s come down to isn’t too surprising. Google (et al) are giving more weight to links earned with good ole fashioned elbow grease. Whether it’s from posting a hand-crafted article to social networking sites like Digg.com (or other forms of link baiting…sounds like a negative connotation but it’s not) or taking the time to build a compelling resource that naturally gains links from relevant and reputable sources/sites. Basically, random link trading and link buying/selling is a big no-no and it will certainly do much more harm then good these days. The big G and the others are way too smart now. So roll up your sleeves, dig in, and write some thoughful content. (most of you reading this post know this already, though!!)

From the blog post: “But more recently, Google has tremendously refined its link-weighting algorithms. We have more people working on Google’s link-weighting for quality control and to correct issues we find.”

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Gary & AvantLink