Checking Your Links Too Often?

jclayc | September 25th, 2006 - 7:01 pm

Update: see Adam Lasnik’s comment below

I read an interesting post on seoblackhat.com today saying that Adam Lasnik of Google confirmed that their “link:www.mysite.com” query i) isn’t very accurate and ii) is seen as a “spammy” request by Google. In other words, people hammering Google.com with “link:www.mysite.com” are effectively revealing themselves as ~nefariously involved~ with SEO. Is this, or will this be, one of Google’s metrics for determining sites that stink of SEO?

Related question: if “link:www.mysite.com” is a no-no, how about “site:www.mysite.com”?

Relevant Resources

[tags]spammy,link query,adam lasnik,google[/tags]

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2 Responses to “Checking Your Links Too Often?”

  1. Adam Lasnik says:
    September 25, 2006 at 9:33 pm

    Okay, okay, this is becoming like a game of telephone.

    “Did you hear that Adam said that any Webmasters who use link: more than three times in a row are *definitely* black hats, and all of their sites will get instantly moved to position 666? And their pets will develop ulcerated sores and all of their t-shirts will come out of the dryer… INSIDE OUT! :o ”

    Lost in all of the commotion were the core points I made in response to the question about the link operator at the seminar:
    1) A TINY (albeit not unimportant) percentage of Google’s users values the link: operator.
    2) We’re always trying to allocate engineering time and resources where they can do the most good.
    3) We haven’t ruled out improving the link: operator in the future.

    Hope this sets the record straight, or at least a bit straighter :-)

  2. jclayc says:
    September 26, 2006 at 12:29 pm

    Thanks for the comment, Adam! I hyped the “scale” of the comment a bit just to incite comments about the (available but) slippery slope of user behavior as a determinant in rankings. Good to see you’ve got a sense of humor!

    One of the reasons it caught my attention is because I use the link: operator but want to stay “on the right side of the law” as it were…

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