I read most of the big marketing forums regularly and every few days there is a “new” link scheme which “works” or success story of how somebody tricked Google algorithms, ranked a website at page 1 and made a quick fortune. I hate that. These people just try to fool the less experienced users to waste their time pursuing short-term success. They buy shady link building services and get severe penalties soon enough.
The Truth is you can deceive Google for a while (much harder lately) but sooner or later you will pay for it.
Don’t get excited
#1 Google has humongous computing power
Have a look what they have got
What is Google’s total computational capacity?
Just an asumtion about how many servers they have
I am not an engineer, for me it is simple mathematics. Average blackhatter use his computer or VPS server. If we compare an average computer to Google data centers we get 1 machine VS 500, 000 ~2, 000, 000 machines. Or in sizes if Google is an average human, the blackhatter would be 10 to 30 times smaller than a flea!
Common sense will assume something else. Blackhatters are thousands, don’t their powers combine as well?
No, they actually work against each other. Because when many people use link building schemes hacks or vulnerabilities of the system it becomes easier to detect them. They create huge footprints and soon enough Google deals with every new scheme. For example spam blog comments, private blog networks, footer links etc.
#2 You can’t abuse Google Plus
Actually you can harm your rankings with fake activity on this social platform. Trying to abuse Google plus is like poking the bear.
You wouldn’t want to be eaten by a bear, do you?
#3 Fake equal Real
Google owned services cannot be abused successfully as any other social platform. And there is just one simple reason- the Traffic. Quality websites get tons of real shares and likes which brings traffic. Fake social signals don’t bring any traffic in most cases.
#4 Google updates more frequently than ever
Good sites can rank faster as the bad ones tank. Shady link scheme has less chance to work for a long time
#5 Youtube now detects fake views
Soon enough it will detect likes and subscriptions, the purpose of which is to manipulate the algorithm. One more marketing channel which will be hard to abuse for SEO purposes.
#6 Quality beats Quantity
This is not something new but lately average SEO folks are wondering how some sites rank for particular search term without targeting the exact keyword in their page or to have many exact match backlinks. The reason is traditional SEO is dead and Google favors Brands before websites. By dead I mean backlinks are not so important anymore. New factors like Co-Citations, Authorship Markup and many others will change the look of SEO as we know it. In fact they already have started.
#7 Google will put an end to Local results manupulation soon
They are working towards local for a few years. Local market is huge and is growing rapidly each year. Google even sell their mobile devices with a minimum margin just to have a better grip. Look at the mobile statistics. In short local traffic is a growing trend and Google will do their best to kick the spammers out of the picture.
Many queries that are done from the desktop now are assumed to have local intent, and certainly anytime you add a modifier – a city name, an address, a ZIP code, those kinds of things – Google is going to think local intent. This means those local results can dominate a lot of search queries, and a ton of searches today are already resulting in a lot of these local types of listings. – SEOMOZ
#8 Algorithms
Some of the best programmers/coders, engineers and many other bright people work in Google. They create complex algorithms, which process enormous amounts of data and help them detect abnormal activities. This video can help you understand how algorithms shape and control our world.
#9 User statistics
As I mentioned backlinks are losing their importance. In the last 12 months monitoring clients’ websites, I have come to the conclusion that user statistics are as much important as backlinks for high Google rankings. I am talking about:
- Traffic, (social, search engines, referrals, direct .etc)
- Time on site compared to your competition
- Page views per unique visitor
- User interactions (click, read, shares,comments .etc)
Great users statistics require exceptional content
Conclusion
- Do not try to trick Google because this is not going to work long term and all your efforts will go down the drain.
- Invest in great content to get peoples attention naturally.
- Create custom strategy for your Social presence.
So many things to think about! Perfect article !
Brilliant article but no word on the game between G and link farms as SAPE. There are many bucks, right?
There is no game between them. SAPE is just a smart way to get good links but many people lost their ranking lately after using backlinks from SAPE. Google has a lot of filters for time frames, languages, anchor text, contextual or in footer/blogroll etc.
If you link profile is not clean and some competitor deiced to report you and you get manual check from Google what do you think is coming next?
Some of the best programmers/coders, engineers and many other bright people work in Google – This is the only reason, stop discussion
Google frequent updates have made it very difficult to maintain the SEO effects for a long time. But I think A good content promotion still has lots of things for SEO to do better. A useful content promotion can stand your results for a long time.
Danny, I totally agree with you, but do not want to belittle the fact that there are still many colleagues continue to optimize their sites that is using sape and other link networks. And the fact that the google is not only not punished them but improves ranking shows that they have a relationship.
Google punish them hard Pano
They are working with tremendous amounts of data and their algorithms include many variables. So they can’t easily punish all unnatural link building at once. They’ve got some system for that. It is very hard when you handle so much data and every change should be made with caution. Or some morning your Google search may look like Yahoo’s 
I read that almost 50% of the sites that had links to sape is injured, so I’m inclined to agree with you Danny. Buying and selling links is a crime.
It is not a crime but it did’t work how most people think.
I agree with your thoughts and i like your photos(http://el.gravatar.com/giannisseo)! There is a very big problem for the google. The organic results can not be changed radically because that would damage the reputation of the engine. So the seo community can be ready for the new changes…