Search Engine Academy of South Carolina

While Google has condemned buying and selling links that pass PageRank, they’ve encouraged listing in paid directories like Yahoo for years. It seems that era may have come to an end.

They have updated their guidelines concerning linking to directories.

Once your Web site was ready they used to encourage us to: 

*  Have other relevant sites link to yours. 
* Submit it to Google http://www.google.com/addurl.html. 
* Submit a Sitemap as part of our Google Webmaster Tools. Google uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your web pages. 
* Make sure that all the sites that should know about your pages are aware that your site is online. 
* Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

They have updated the guidelines to encourage us to follow these steps when your site is ready:

* Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html. 
* Submit a Sitemap using Google Webmaster Tools. Google uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages. 
* Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online.

So what does this really mean to us?  It was asked of one of Google Techs and his response was this:

This line was removed because we feel that you should not “force” other sites to link to yours. Obviously it’s good that sites link to each other, it’s fine to encourage that on your sites to link out and to make it easy for them to link to yours. However, I don’t think we need to make it a part of the guidelines that you should “have other sites link to yours” — they should be willing to do that on their own, it should be their decision not yours.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!