Līve Ambitions

Remember the days when it was common to see a PR5 or PR6 site?  Prior to the BigDaddy update in early 2006, Google was more generous about giving out PageRank.  Nowadays, you’d be lucky to get a PR4.  Even authority websites have a tough time reaching PR5 or PR6.

Google has changed the landscape of the SEO industry.  Shortly after the BigDaddy update, link buying slowed down because so many websites, blogs and directories lost their PageRanks.  Then, webmasters realized that most websites were affected by the PR update, and began to adapt to the trend.  The game has changed.  Today, webmasters are still buying links, but with less regard for PR.  PR3′s and PR4′s are the PR5′s and PR6′s of the pre-BigDaddy days.  I believe the prices of links have adapted to the change as well.

There’s another hurdle for the SEO industry.

Google has become more savvy about detecting paid links.  Buying links for SEO seems to be a hit and miss situation.  Some links count towards PR juice, while others don’t.  It’s no secret that Google has had the capability of discounting certain blocks of links from any website.  Here’s what Matt Cutts had to say regarding backlinks: “Do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight.”

The traditional way of checking for backlinks in Google was to run a search query like this: link:www.domain.com

Unfortunately, the traditional way won’t give you an accurate measure of your backlinks because most of the results are filtered out.  Based on speculations, Google supposedly only shows PR3 links and above using their link query.

Google does, however, offer a more accurate backlink tool via their Webmaster Tools section.  You will need a Google account, and you are limited to websites you own or have access to.

If you check Yahoo’s index tool using Site Explorer, you’ll see some drastic differences in the number of backlinks.  Unfortunately, Site Explorer counts some internal links as backlinks too. 

No backlink tool is 100% perfect.

By keeping SEOs in the dark, Google hopes to deter link buying as much as possible.  We must admit, it has worked to some degree.  There are webmasters who have stopped selling links from their website due to fear of getting penalized or banned by Google.  While others have adopted the “nofollow” tag policy for all paid links.