Thanks

Considering the SEO industry is now worth billions of dollars and you have SEO’s competing against SEOs; and the damage webmasters can cause to their site if an outgoing link domain suddenly turns black hat in terms of their trust rank it seems unrealistic to me that enough web authors will say
‘hey, I’m going to add a link to this resource’ without first taking a long pause to think if it is going to hurt their rankings.

The general consensus with paid links is that only sites with high relevance to your site with a high PR that don’t have a million and one outbound links distributing their maximum PR are worth buying anyway. In one sense, this seems to be saying to the author selling the link ‘I am confident that if I get a higher PR from having your site link to me, I will get my money back by having a high quality site’. The flip side of this from the buyers point of view is that the PR they gain from this paid link will decrease proportionally with the number of other links other web designers/SEOs buy, and more so if the buyers have low quality sites. In terms of PR, it is only worth getting a link if you are confident the seller won’t post a million other links.

Plus, personally I’m really protesting Googles’ giving so much importance to backlinks in rating a site, because my links don’t show internet users approval of my site. Those who like any of my posts, or content mostly copy/paste them to their own sites, instead of linking back. This duplicate content thing is hurting me very much. It doesn’t look like the duplicate content filters are working in my language.

I guess I’m really full about SEO these days. Thanks…

My bad, I knew what caused the problem.

I had changed my User-Agent and set it to googlebot, because I was just spying on the sites of the other competitors if they were doing anything fishy.

This is Benj Arriola and unless someone else already told you, SEOPhilippines.org recently put up this SEO Contest mainly for people of the Philippines. It started June 1 (June 1 at 12:00pm Manila Time, that is +8GMT) and the keywords are: “Isulong SEOPh” without quotes of course. And I guess so many queries were done on Google, that when I did a backlink check on several websites, I get this:

Google Error

We’re sorry…

… but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.

We’ll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, if you suspect that your computer or network has been infected, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your systems are free of viruses and other spurious software.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we’ll see you again on Google.

I was first thiking it can be a suspicion based on the site in query, so I tried doing a backlink check on other sites not related to the contest. Still the same error.

Now I am thinking it is based on the person doing the query. And maybe it can be my IP. And I also thought it can be caused by the general location of the query. And Google should be receiving a lof of these queries related to the contest for the next few months. Contest ends on Sept. 29, 2006. +8GMT. Right now, I am just relying on Yahoo and MSN’s backlink check but they follow nofollow sometimes and getting a peak at Google’s backlink check is a better checker of the status of things.

Just giving you guys a heads up on what to expect on queries with the words isulong and seoph and coming from locations mainly from the Philippines and locations around the world with large concentrations of Filipinos.

More power to you Matt and to Google. That Interview with Danny on the ‘DNS Hijacked Radio Show’ was very good as so fast. Up to now I am still listing to it just to catch up with everything.

I have read your policies on comments and I did not know where to place this because it may be off topic, so I did a search for “SEO Contest” so at least my comment is about a contest on a post on a contest.

No way. A norwegian will win it

Actually I think we all will win it if it helps Google in any way to pinpoint glitches in the algo. I sure hope it provides you with valuable information.