Internal linking:

When Google says that ‘breadcrumbs help users to understand where they are‘ in a post about links, it means that Google really wants you to implement breadcrumbs to help them index and rank your site properly. Luckily, any good internal link structure includes breadcrumbs, because of their Freedom Anchor Text.

Anchor Text mattered a lot yesterday, it matters a lot today and it will matter a lot in the future. While some say that ‘they’ve seen a decrease in the importance of anchor text’, when Google repeatedly says that ‘descriptive anchor text is important‘, they mean it.

Linking out:

‘Thoughtful outbound links can help your credibility.‘ Not only is this true for visitors, but I also believe that linking out to reputable sources on a regular basis is way better than trying to do your utmost to ‘prevent PageRank leaks’. And I know I’m not the only one.

Inbound links:

Ok, this last post was quite a bit disappointing. While the subject (links) was apparently worth it to spend an entire week on, Maile Ohye did her best to let the readers think that inbound links aren’t that important. The line ‘Have other relevant sites link to you‘ disappeared from Google’s Webmaster Guidelines earlier this month, so it looks like they’re covering up the small amount of information they’ve shared on this subject.

This post, Recapped: Google’s Link Week, was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.

Earlier this year, Wiep.net received a PageRank penalty because of a few sponsored links (not sponsoring me, though) in the footer. In that post, I said that

Some have suggested to nofollow or remove the links in the footer and to do a reinclusion request, but I’ve decided not to. In stead, I’ll do exactly what I said I will do my footer; I’ll leave the links up (which is mandatory when you use the template) until I have a new design.

Apparently, Google didn’t like this. All posts that were published before this date (including the PR penalty post) show up in Google without a problem. Every post that got published after I said that I won’t live by all rules that Google sets, however, don’t. Pages still get cached and indexed, but they just don’t show up anymore. No signal in the Google Webmaster console, btw.

So, Matt, after the #6 penalty, the -950 penalty, and other penalties, is this the Silence! penalty?

This post, The Don’t-Push-It Penalty, was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.

This is the original version:

And this is the “Dutch” version:

It’s not data center based -both cached versions above were requested from the same data center IP-, but it seems to be language based, as the Dutch version of Google Belgium shows the same version as well.

To make this even stranger, the “cache” link that Google provides on every cached page (top left), does not work anymore. This link points to http://www.google.com/intl/en/help/features.html#cached, but their is no cache anchor present on the page. In fact, the word anchor doesn’t even get mentioned on the page, in contrast to, let’s say, about a year ago.

Is this strange or is it just me?

This post, What’s Going On with Google Cache?, was published on Wiep's link building blog. Visit the site to read more stuff, or to join the link building conversation.