According to Matt Cutts, “We’ve done a good job of ignoring boilerplate, site wide links. In the last few months, we’ve been trying to make the point that not only is link buying like that not doing any good, we’re turning the dial up to let people know that certain link spam techniques are a waste of money.”
What does this mean? It means if you are using footer links to promote certain keywords, hoping for more SEO value, it’s not going to work. It’s not only going to not work, but it could actually hurt you. On that note, Matt Cutts wrote on Google+
Earlier this year, Google revealed that we sent out over 700,000 messages to site owners in January and February 2012 via our free webmaster console at http://google.com/webmasters . I wanted to clarify a misconception about those messages. A lot of people assumed that most or all of the 700K messages were related to “unnatural link warnings” that some site owners received.
The reason for sending the 700,000 messages via Webmaster Tools was actually because we started sending out warnings about blackhat techniques. The vast, vast majority of manual actions we take are on pages that are engaging in egregious blackhat SEO techniques, such as automatically created gibberish or cloaking.
In fact, of the messages that we sent out to site owners, only around 3% were for unnatural or artificial links. So just to be clear, of the 700,000 messages we sent out in January and February, well above 600,000 were for obvious blackhat spam, and under 25,000 of the messages were for unnatural links.
I have to admit, I really enjoyed PotPieGirls comment’s regarding this
I then imagined a webmaster who was frantically working to get all his/her “bad” links removed getting an email that said what Ryan’s tweet said.
I have no doubt their first thought would be, “Holy Sh*t!! Please don’t link to me!!!!“
This is how things have become in the wonderful land of Google. If Google wasn’t so powerful and virtually the main doorway to the internet, I don’t think we’d all care so much…but Google IS mighty powerful and Google IS the main doorway to the internet (in a BIG way).
It’s sad. It’s actually kinda scary. Makes me really worry about folks like us out there trying their best to make all this work.
I wonder how many silly photos of Matt I can put up before he manually de-lists PMI?
