Promoting the Promoters: The latest “zig” to Google’s “zag”

As the world turns, and the earthquakes shake and the poles are shifting and the earths atmosphere is warming and the water levels are rising and the food shortages and drought and melting of the polar ice cap sets in…. there’s another, somewhat less meaningful shift taking place at Google. It’s the inevitable, and never ending shift in their beloved and secret search algorithm.

This round of change affects backlinks and their value. You’ve probably noticed (if you follow these sorts of things) that large percentages of your website’s backlinks have been disappearing from Google’s indexed listings lately. If that has been happening to you, you are likely one of the countless millions of people whose backlinks have been devalued by Google to such a degree that they have been dropped from their listings. The unfortunate side affect of this is that your search engine ranking will follow right behind – plummeting into the abyss of Google’s devalued indexed pages.

What Google has begun to do is look much more closely at the authority of the backlink source and not just the number of backlinks themselves. If the authority of that site/page isn’t high enough, it simply ignores the link in their account of your site and the resulting indexed listing for your pages. The result can be devastating for those who built optimized sites around a network of relatively low authority backlinks.

What this means in SEO terms is that the game has changed. Again. Instead of getting sites to “promote” your site (aka backlinks), you must now “promote the promoters” in that your SEO activities need to promote not only your site but also the sites that hold the incoming links as well.

“But Wait!!!” you say… “that’s going to have a logarithmic affect on our SEO activity and investment!!?!”

Yes it will! Unless, of course you can figure out how it’s done, or find an SEO firm who understands how to play the new game