For ages the search engine rankings have been influenced by the links pointing to a site.  Way back when, it used to just be quantity of links but not for long.  People realized it was better to be linked on pages that search engines crawled more regularly and over time this evolved into the race for pagerank.

The pagerank race was easy to understand and track with the Google toolbar.  This helped too many people to be able to game the system and chaos started to prevail as relevancy no longer matter since the link game was too easy to manipulate.  This is when non-internet people started to “googlebomb” the rankings for fun and smart people made alot of money in a very short amount of time.   

Professional webmasters turned to blogspam and buying links to fully exploit the exposed weaknesses.  This meant that good programmers and rich webmasters were taking the top stops because they were smart enough to spam or buy their way to the top.  Webmasters that were manually trying to compete and still follow the search engine guidelines were left in the dust.

During this time search engines started taking steps to handicap webmasters.  The backlink search on Google and Yahoo was redesigned to the point that it provides little useful information.  The toolbars have also deteriorated to the point that they no longer are reliable.  This change has really helped to limit the number of successful webmasters by taking away resources that many honest webmasters relied on.  However this still did not address the situation of the spammers and link buyers.

To swing the “quality” pendulum away from these people in the serps, engines tried new ways to qualify links without leaking these new methods.  The word that most people use to describe this is “trust”.  Search engines are trying to determine the level of trust between sites and rank sites with the highest amount of combined trust.

Here are some ways that search engines have tried to determine trust:

“nofollow” tag : This was originally launched to combat spammers.  The nofollow attribute was to be added to links that were not manually verified or trusted by the site owners (ie blog comments and bought links) This has turned out to be mostly a scare tactic.  Each engine handles this tag differently but link power is still transferred from links that have a nofollow tag.

Run of Site (ROS) : Outbound links that are ROS are mostly bought links.  If they are not bought links, then they are someone’s attempt at link manipulation.  It is very hard to come up with a situation that an outbound ROS link is a relevant links and thus the search engines have greatly devalued them and some have even gone farther.

Time : Good links will be published and left alone.  Bad links generally don’t stay alive for as long.  People that buy links go after weeks or months and not normally years.  Also some of the blogspam that slips past the automated filters will get deleted over in the first few weeks.  From a search engine POV another good reason to devalue links that have been published for a short amount of time is that is makes it harder to quickly reverse engineering and determine which links have power and which links are a waste of time.

Manual Review : Links from sites that have manual reviews give big trust points.  Sites like DMOZ, Yahoo Directory and others are very important.  It is not a coincidence that sites listed in these manually reviewed directories dominate the top rankings.  Being listed in these directories is not enough by itself to get a high ranking but not being listed is a huge handicap.

I don’t see link development getting any easier in the future.  Search engines are trying to combat the hardcore SEOs who have the resources to reverse engineer and manipulate the search engines.  The honest webmasters who are strictly following the search engine guidelines are getting caught in the crossfire of this battle.  The one thing we can be certain is that this struggle between search engines and internet marketers will not stop anytime soon and link development will continue to evolve. 

I’ll save “link baiting” for another post.