From Leading Australian Professional - Anthony Parsons
Link popularity is a winning factor in many campaigns to achieve a substantial boost in your rankings, however; with all good can come over-inflated and out of control manipulation (BAD).
The search engines will not be defeated for long. Those who think they can get away with something in the short term will generally come unstuck in the long term. Google recently changed their algorithm (end 2003) which has upset many website owners who relied upon Google results to provide them business. To me, that is ineffective marketing, which ever way you look at it.
Websites who dominated the rankings because of link popularity suddenly became unstuck and are now, nowhere to be seen. Websites with minimal popularity but great content and even those with little content and medium popularity have begun to dominate the rankings for their given terms. Many people blame Google, blame SEO's and anyone else they can blame. These are free rankings that your contending within, which are constantly being manipulated to use every inch from the system structure.
Users are not going to tolerate this for long if they cannot find quality content and products when they search. With this sudden upset and some minor tweaking by Google, the results will eventually steady and those who once dominated will still not be seen.
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