This is sadly true and it's because of the way these sites are built to work. Blogs, Social Media and Forums have one thing in common and that is the Fresh-Stuff Orientation. This sites have been designed to promote the new and let the old fade away. Let's think of it like this:
You are standing in a line! And in front of the line there is one guy facing the line. Every ten seconds a new guy comes in front of the line and all those present in line make one stop back. After 5 minutes … do you think the guy who faces the line will hear what you have to say?
So you manage to get a link on a blog and it's the latest post. That link helps a bit but the more posts are added the more that page steps back and finally steps away from the homepage. That's usually the moment when its strength fades. You will say: But that page had many pingbacks. It's popular! - Unfortunately those pingbacks work in the same way. They fade away.
These sites are designed to diminish the importance of a post the more it ages and push aggressively the new content. Along with the posts importance your link's importance fades away too.
Many think if they hit Digg homepage they strike gold. That doesn't happen in 99.9% of times. Because if you do hit it maybe you get some links from some blogs or news sites which eventually … Guest what! … fade away!
This aging process is the reason why link-building in social web is not an option.
Everything I try to explain in this site is about performance. Hitting a nail in the head with a hammer 100 times will eventually get it to go inside the wall but I want to teach you how to hit it just once and get the same results!
I think you know SEOByTheSEA. I wouldn't say I read it but when I came across this site one thing struck me. As I was expression-less staring at the page I felt I had to do this: I opened VC++ and wrote 10 lines of code to check on something. And guess what … I was right. He has over 400 links on his homepage. So that site belongs to the owner of a SEO Company and has 400+ links on the homepage and only 2 were nofollow-ed 2 weeks ago when I checked.
It's SEO 101 to keep links below 100 on a page. The truth is Google will not ban you if you go over 100 but there is another problem (related to common-sense) and here's a new anecdote that talks about the PageRank algorithm. The Google founders described this when they created it (found this on a edu site) as the probability of getting on a site by randomly browsing the web (more or less).
Let's say someone goes to a dog-pound and wants to choose a puppy. And one of those desperately-in-need-of-a-loving-shelter puppies is you! And the one who wants to adopt is shown 10-25 puppies of which he must choose one. There's a pretty high probability to choose you! But if you have 400+ puppies the odds are not in your favor anymore.
Cross the above anecdote over the summary of the PageRank algorithm and tell me what value do you think links on a (no matter how strong) page have … if there's 400 of them? There's rumours :) that PR splits between links on a page more of less equally (actually it's a fact but I'm joking a bit). Divide by 400 and think about it?
I persunally believe (as Miss South Carolina said) that I would never hesitate to trade a link on a page with hundreds of links with a link on a less popular page with less then 100 (50 is better) links if both are on-topic. But that's just silly ol'me!
Still they will get you indexed and maybe ranking for some obscure, never-searched-for terms but real link-building has to be done on pages that will stay where they are in the (at least) near future. That's why bloggers should also think outside the blogosphere when link-building. Add BlogRoll, SideBars links and Comments Links and think that Blogs usually exceed the 50-100 links common-sense limit.
It's easy to get 10 links from Social Web but it's much better to work for a link on non-fresh-content oriented site which will always out-worth (I don't know if this is a word:)) any 10+ social links. Don't put too much value on volatile links. You may be disappointed or never reach your full potential!
If you disagree feel free to comment ;) and Jim Boykin agrees with me … indirectly.
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