Is Inbound Link Authority Dying?

I do hope link popularity is dying so that those with the most relevance, most useful and original content will get the best rankings. For some of us who take our blog posts very seriously and our make sure our pages are updated with "heavy" content, changes in the index would be good. The more google rewards quality the better for some of us....Each blog post I write (not nearly often enough) takes 2-4 hours to put together. And they often get excellent rankings for their subject right away. ~ j

I've read there has been a bigger shift from inbound links to age of domain which in my opinion (especially for real estate) may not be the greatest since It's not all that hard to find aged domains with outdated information. Speaking on experience, I see little value ranking a site higher that has the most current market statistics from 2004 on it just because it is an older domain.

I agree that age shouldn't matter in and of itself but has to be combined with new & updated content since its creation to be worth considering.

The web is suffering right now because webmasters have to concentrate too much of their time acquiring links when the time should be spent on content.

My site was one of the 20-30 REW sites that got penalized a few months ago. Before my site received the penalty I had already removed my state pages, so I guess Google went off of previous recent history! Before submitting a reinclusion request I removed the remainder of every single reciprocal link I could find, and eventually got rid of the 3-ways I had forgotten about. Well, when Google un-penalized my site I was back within a few spots from where I was previous on some keyphrases, while other keyphrases I didn't lose any ground at all. So, from experience, the links do not have the authority at least I thought they had. I have about 450-550 pages of content, so I suspect this (among many factors) is what carried me and is carrying me in the serps.

Unless you notified all of your reciprocals that you were removing their links, your authority now partly comes from all of the one way links pointing to you that are still out there. If you had a substantial amount of recips you should now move up in the serps until they catch on and remove you from their sites.

"Unless you notified all of your reciprocals..." Yes, I did notify all my partners. I think that was part of the problem. As I tracked down the partners they had already deleted my link or the link was sitting on a page not indexed. Some were in supplemental results. So, the reverse was true. I was giving away many one-way links without a link back!

When I took my pages down I found the same thing. So many agents have no regard for others.

I totally agree with bigtoe in that the web is suffering because of webmasters spending so much time on getting links. It would be great if we could just concentrate on what's really important - content!

I love adding content to my site and have seen the results!

Google may be the top authority on websearch but they certainly aren't very efficient from what I've seen and learned about how they work. It is all too automated in my opinion, we would have better quality websites up and people could find exactly what they are looking for, not what google thinks you are looking for. C Hamberger HomeEzSearch