Panda is coming up for a year old now and the dust has more or less settled. The sites that got hit and did nothing are still down; the ones that cut the thin, scraped, written-for-robots pages have mostly clawed their way back. What interests me more is what it did to the way people talk about links.
For years the link-building conversation was a numbers game. How many links did you build this month, what’s your domain count, can you get me a thousand more. I sat in meetings in 2009 and 2010 where the entire measure of an SEO campaign was the size of the link total, and nobody in the room seemed troubled by where those links came from.
I think that era is ending, and Panda is part of why, even though Panda was pointed at content rather than links. It made Google look serious about quality in a way a lot of people had assumed it never would; there was a settled belief that search would always be gameable if you had enough patience and enough cheap labour. Once you accept that Google can judge content, it’s a short step to worrying that it can judge the sites your links sit on.
The stuff that would worry me if I were buying links today, and I’m not recommending you buy them:
- Site-wide footer links across a network. They were obvious to a human in 2008 and they’re more obvious now.
- Directories that exist only to sell links. If a directory has no editorial standard and no traffic of its own, a link from it says nothing about you.
- Article spinning. One article rewritten four hundred ways and blasted out. Panda already made the destination pages worthless; the links from those pages can’t be far behind.
What I’d rather put the budget into is slower and harder to buy. A guest post on a site people actually read. A piece of research that gives a journalist a reason to cite you. Getting listed somewhere because you deserve to be, not because you paid a tenner. The trouble is these don’t scale, and a client used to a monthly link count finds “we earned four good links this month” a hard number to love.
I don’t think Google has finished with links. Everything about the direction of the last two years says the cheap tactics have a shelf life and it’s getting shorter. If your rankings sit on a foundation of paid and spun links, this is the year I’d start weaning yourself off, before the decision gets made for you.
That last point is the one I keep repeating to anyone who’ll listen, and mostly they nod and carry on buying links anyway.
