Salted.

Heh. Small world! I found your blog by trying Google's new blog search to check up on ways to get the email forwarding on Fasthosts working. Email forwarding can be a challenge but SEO is something I've a lot more experience with.

The "hub" theory isn't new. For years it's been suggested that Google does not like dead end pages. Then the "hilltop" paper (an academic paper rather than a patent) described how a search engine (Google given the Stanford connection) uses authority and expert sites to help filter PageRank. An expert site is one which is high quality, moderated and which links to other sites (and authority is one which more than one expert links too). It's not certain that Google uses anything like the hilltop algorithm but it's widely believed it does.

Of course, I think the strongest proof that a quality outbound link can help is the "temporal" Google patent (actually patent us20050071741_1) where it says clearly that Google will look at the quality of advertisements and rate a site that links to a trusted and high traffic site (amazon.com is the example) differently (okay, it doesn't say better) than one which links to poor quality sites.

It's a hot topic, I suppose, lots of SEO will tell you that linking out does not help but it's really impossible to isolate a single change and measure what that does to your site - for example, adding the link text to your site might counter the benefit of a good link. I actually think Fasthosts are right on this front, the evidence from Google (especially the patent) does strongly point to quality links helping (the other point is that you control which links go on your site so it's a fair measurement to make).

An issue to watch is that Fasthosts do offer something of a SEO service so I'm sure that might put the cat among the pigeons!

Andrew
October 4, 2005 11:53 PM

Andrew, thanks for the very detailed info on that. I still stand by what I said - they're saying you'll get better rankings by linking to them - if I could increase my ranking by linking to Fasthosts, imagine what effect a link to a better company could have! I'd have links to IBM, Google, Amazon etc. on every site I made.

By the looks of it that patent is really only about penalising sites that have shady outbound links, not rewarding sites that link out to quality sites.

It still stands that Fasthosts are going to gain far, far, far more from this than their customers - yet it's being sold as if this is a benefit to the customers.

Maybe (and that's a big maybe) what they're saying isn't strictly untrue, but it's still hugely misleading.

Hey, maybe someone from Fasthosts will come and set the record straight!

(By the way, your blog is very intruiging Andrew!)

Paul
October 5, 2005 12:07 AM

I noticed Fasthosts shady practices too, and posted about them.

Even after reading about the Hilltop paper, I agree with you that, at the very least, their wording is misleading.

What was even worse is, that when I contacted Fasthosts about this, they refused to answer my questions, as I'm not a customer of theirs (any more).

Iwein
October 17, 2005 3:38 PM

Hi all,
posted about this a while back at http://www.conseoquences.com/articles/hosting-company-link-attempt.php as I had similare misgivings - sorry about double post.

M

Mike
December 8, 2006 2:21 PM