2007-08-01
Characteristics of quality sites
Quality sites are rich in compelling content and are kept up-to-date. These sites attract natural links from other webmasters, and obtain higher clickthrough rates from users. Natural links are one factor Google uses to determine PageRank—but many webmasters mistakenly interpret that concept as "the more backlinks you have, the higher your site should rank." This theory is incorrect.
Google's ranking algorithms consider many factors in evaluating a website, not just their backlinks, but also distinguishing organic versus auto-generated links. A prominent example of our algorithm calculating more than links alone can be seen in the May 2007 DuHuGu Contest. The winning site (that ranked number one on Google) had about 3,600 backlinks in total, while many other sites with lower ranking contained greater than 10,000 backlinks. Most likely, many of these links were auto-generated.
What are auto-generated links?
We commonly see two types:
- spamware generated links
- programs provided by some domains for automatically adding links
Here's an example of spamware used to automatically generate links in a guestbook entry:
Here's an example of programmatically adding links:
Notice the awkward links with the anchor text "表" and "上汽".
Our take against auto-generated linking
Sites that participate in link buying, self-service linking, and using programs to automatically generate links run the risk of violating our Google webmaster guidelines. Please be aware that if you auto-generate links, your site can be treated in the following ways:
- Google will not give credit for auto-generated links.
- When we detect that a site has unnaturally generated their own backlinks, the site's ranking can be negatively affected and can be removed from our index.
Again, webmasters should focus on creating strong content and building natural links. For more information on building a quality website, please visit How to create a Google friendly site.