Link Juice – good and bad links

Link Juice is still being discussed regularly, and despite the ever-changing rules about what is a good link and what is a bad link, you do still need to have links (backlinks / incoming links) to get Page Rank, visitors, and hence sales. But let’s remember that it is not the search engines who will buy your products or services – it is the customers who find your links and follow them who are the ones who will part with cash, so link juice is as important for traffic flow as it is for SEO.

However, there are some in the SEO World who have decided they know better than Google and have decided that ‘outing’ or reporting sites with what they feel to be ‘bad’ or spammy links is fair game. For instance, Rand at SEOMoz decided to out a site for the term ‘seo company’ last week.

We are back into the black hat vs white hat SEO techniques debate again. Although I agree with some of his points, there are also issues about whether a single individual should be able to blog about a site like this and undo what may have taken months or years to achieve, and undoubtedly cost money. (And I don’t mean in acquiring paid links, I mean in paying those who set the links up with directories etc in the first place.)

It should be taken as at the very least a salutory warning that the search engines do act upon reports such as these, and your hard work can be undone. Seemingly, whether you are using dubious or valid techniques.