SEO CheckList

With regards to achieving visibility, on-site SEO is the prime factor. Tinker with the title tags, the headings, keyword density, layout of the pages, etcetera. PageRank, however, is a game of links and more links. Now, with regards to links, one might wonder if the age of the link has anything to do with its potency. Well, I believe so. Links for me are like wine — the older they are, the finer and the better. And I bet Google thinks so too.

So how does Google judge links based on time? First, they take into account the time the links are indexed. And then, they also take note when the links are edited and when the contents where the links are located are edited. But in essence, Google weighs older links a lot more than newer ones. I think it’s only fair, don’t you? In reality, web sites keeping links for a long time means they’re still in favor of the ones they link to (unless they’re paid links).

Why are newer links less valued? Well, it’s an effort by Google to curtail climbing in the SERPs by rapid buying of links. Just think of how fast new sites could climb up the ranks with just money on their side. The Google sandbox ensures that doesn’t happen at least for competitive keywords. For the PageRank algorithm, however, there’s no contest that older links are weighed more and new sites gaining inbound links at a tremendous speed could get flagged as a spam site.

Because of Google’s policy on the temporal aspect of inbound links there are unscrupulous web masters who take advantage of the situation. They’ve developed a technique called “Google popping” wherein which they put up links of their competitors in their web sites and then pull them right back down after the page got indexed.