Free links to your site…from google.com
- 20th Oct 2008
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I can’t believe a new feature from Google isn’t getting more notice, because it gives you quality links from a PR10 domain, for free.
Dave was rooting around in Google’s robots.txt file one night last week (as you do) which led him on to their sitemap, which eventually leads you to around 150,000 static URIs for Google user profiles. Most are content- and inlink-free as profiles haven’t seen much use across the Google platform as yet, but some profiles have picked up a couple of links and toolbar PR of their own. If you buy into the idea that domain authority is as large a factor as that of the specific page you receive a link from (and we do) free links don’t get much better than this.
Get them while they’re hot. Looks like we’re not the only ones who have noticed.
Google has a certification program for pharmacies? Who knew?!
31 Comments | Leave a comment »
Add a link and watch what happens. Google figures our who you are and proposes links to all the social media sites you’re a member of. This is proof that they’re building a huge social graph.
Even when they add nofollow then the profiles will still be full of spam.
Indeed. Bebo’d before they even get the profiles thing off the ground.
Great find :D
However I bet that in a couple of days, rel=”nofollow” will appear ..
This has been out for a lot of time.
I remember i added a link of mine many months ago.
But i think that if you don’t link your profile it doesn’t even get indexed. Mine at least is not.
Just checked it out and I don’t seem to have the same ‘privileges’ as what’s been suggested.
Unsure why but better luck next time!
Ben M
Ben, do you have your profile set to public?
I’ve tried it from both my work and personal profile and works fine for me…I can add links using the “short bio” editor and the “Add links” form.
Patrick summed it up perfectly on twitter: “Rule 1 of the internet: If a big site lets you edit their pages then they will get spammed”.
I just wrote about this, my blog has a screen shot.
http://www.jozsoft.com/blog/?p=17
It’s not like BBG having a Google profile was a secret dude, it is and always has been since we made it, right in our “social media” section in the sidebar of the site along with all the *other* social media profiles we have. But thanks for sticking us in with a bunch of shit spam sites. As for PR… our profile page is less than two months old and we didn’t see any boost in toolbar PR or ranks as a result of it, as an FYI, least not yet.
Rae, I wasn’t trying lump BBG and the other profile I linked in with the spammers, I mentioned them purely because they were the first couple of profiles I came across that had toolbar PR. I didn’t even look at the actual site…if I’d known it was someone in the biz I’d have picked a different example!
Nice catch. Cant see how to make up a profile - I musn’t have the rights or something.
Worth mentioning that the only profiles we’ve seen with toolbar PR are those with links in from external sites, but imo the links alone wouldn’t account for their high PR so believe they’re also benefiting from authority trickle down.
Not only isn’t this exactly new, but I could have sworn this was even on Sphinn a while back (where useful secrets go to blow up).
But now that everyone is pointing out how it can be abused by spammers, wait for this to become worthless in 5…4…3… 2…
…1
I was using it for quick indexing. Had a few new sites I tested get indexed in a couple hours.
Now I guess I’ll use it to….send DaveN the bird.
There may very well be some clever ways of gaming this. Thanks for this promising clue.
We picked up on this too, it might be an example of Google trying to compete with Facebook and linked.in for name and employment searches.
http://connect.icrossing.co.uk/google-compete-facebooks-public-profiles_827
People are forgetting though that Google doesn’t *need* nofollow to be added. They can quite easily achieve the same effect with an internal rule. They’ve been zapping links for ages now - how much juice are the followed footer links at the Standford Daily passing these days?
Nofollow is there to indicate to Google how you want the links treated. They especially don’t need this communication for one of their own sites. I would be shocked if this is passing any juice.
The only reason they would add nofollow now is as a PR move. In the current state, other UGC sites can point to this and ask why nofollow is absent (and ask why Google suggested *they* add it). I don’t think it would make any practical difference.
>the links alone wouldn’t account for their high PR so believe they’re also benefiting from authority trickle down.
@Daniel
All due respect but are you sure we’re not doing a re-run of the “Google Knols inherit authority” argument here? :)
“If you buy into the idea that domain authority is as large a factor as that of the specific page you receive a link from (and we do) free links don’t get much better than this.”
Trust me, these profile links don’t benefit sites in that way, so: no, they don’t. :)
Hah! My cunning plan to weasel information out of Matt paid off ;-) Thanks for the clarification!
> All due respect but are you sure we’re not doing a re-run of the “Google Knols inherit authority” argument here? :)
Dunno, I didn’t pay much attention to knols Nick…just as you pointed out about these profiles I assumed there’d be something in place to prevent them from passing good vibes.
The thing I found most interesting about the public profiles is that the ones we’ve found with toolbar PR seem to have that out of all proportion to their inbound links, which *would* seem to add weight to the idea of inherited authority, even if links from them have been neutered to stop it being passed on to third party sites.
Another thing is that Patrick’s “Rule 1 of the internet: If a big site lets you edit their pages then they will get spammed” is just as true whether links are helping or not.
If there’s an invisible mechanism to stop them acting as a vote from Google that spam is going to be pretty high volume. If there’s a visible clue such as a nofollow you’re still going to get a ton of spam from the more clueless end of the black hat spectrum.
>out of all proportion to their inbound links
Yes but are you sure you’re seeing all their inbound links? That seemed to be the crutch of the Knol debate. People were only seeing a few of the available IBL and concluding that the unseen juice was coming from the domain authority itself.
Just throwing that in there though, we seem to be coming from the same place on the juice value :)
Thanks to Matt though for clarifying that point although now he’s got me wondering about the ways profile links *do* benefit sites. Just traffic I guess but you never know. Being in Russia has made me way too cryptic :D
By no means sure I’m seeing all their IBLs - who can? - though I am using a mix of tools to scope them out. The paucity of links in across different profiles with PR2-3 would seem to back up the idea they’re link poor but have a high toolbar PR, relatively speaking.
[…] Kostenlose Links von Google.com - aber wohl nicht mehr lange […]
“Trust me, these profile links don’t benefit sites in that way, so: no, they don’t. :)”
@mattcutts If that’s true why have the profiles now been removed? All of the profile links in this post are now 404’s.
@Kevin
Why wouldn’t Google manually remove obviously spammy material from their profiles section? They are doing this for Knols too, so I’m guessing the same quality check people are involved.
Personally I don’t think nofollow really deters many spammers from dropping their links anyway - so the benefit in adding it is marginal. At most, it’s a visible sign that Google will limit the juice but other engines don’t to the same degree. There is also that persistant rumour that *some* juice gets through anyway.
The only way to balance a link based algo seems to be large scale manual moderation. Whether it’s paid links or cleaning up UGC. No wonder Google are looking around at alternatives.
Nick, I agree with what your saying but large scale manual moderation would be a huge job, is it really worth the effort?
I would have thought the best way would be to devalue all profile links, either by nofollow or
Nick, I agree with what your saying but large scale manual moderation would be a huge job, is it really worth the effort?
I would have thought the best way would be to devalue all profile links by adding a nofollow attribute. If this isn’t used and links are automatically devalued internally by Google, surely this isn’t good as they’ll still have value in Yahoo and other SE’s?
Good find - I also found another way to get a follow link on Google:
http://www.seounique.com/blog/how-to-get-a-text-link-on-google/
(Hope you don’t mind if I share?)
@Kevin
From a business case, it hardly hurts Google’s market position for the other indexes out there to be more spammy ;)
Agree on the other point, it’s not scalable and not worth the effort. I’m sure this is why Google are looking for alternatives. Largely though you don’t need 100% moderation to be effective. Ban 500 sites for selling links and the news will stop another 5000 doing the same.
gone now :(
I wanna make my website to be easily find when potential customers search products through the engine,can you tell me some free search engines ,especialy related to motors?
Thank you.