Barry Schwartz on the Hyperlink Hot Seat

I have a treat in store for all three of you regular LBB readers. It’s a new series called the Hyperlink Hot Seat. I have lined up over a gross of SEO experts to answer five quick questions for us (the questions will be different for each Hot Seater, although some may overlap). I’ll post a new edition every friday, or, failing that, whenever I feel like it. Without further adieu, I give you…

Barry Schwartz on the Hyperlink Hot Seat

Barry Schwartz is the President of RustyBrick, Inc., a Web services firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. He also maintains a weblog, SERoundtable, which is both widely read and highly recommended.

1) Directories: helpful link building tool, or in Google’s firing range?

They are possibly the easiest links one can get, aside from paying you guys for them. But recent news from DaveN, SEW Moderator, and someone who should be listened to, says that Google is actually devaluing the links from directories.  I have more information on this at http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002169.html.  So yes, it is within Googleâs firing range.  Will Google devalue links from well respected directories?  I don’t think so.

2) Autolink: proof that Google is now evil, or blown way out of proportion?

"Do no evil", oh boy is that catch phrase killing the company.  I wonder if they wish they never used that phrase.  From the people I know at Google, they are all very loyal to Google.  They are loyal to Googleâs mission; "Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful."  They will do almost anything to make that happen, staying within law.  If that means surfing the forums to spot spammers and then track them down, that is what they will do.  If that means not givin a spammer a reason to why his or her site was banned, then they would do it.  Deep inside, I feel those employees loyal to Google have a strong dislike towards anything that manipulates the results.  Of course, that dislike is felt amongst the SEO community.  I guess you are seeing my point.

Autolink, that is a side issue.  It was a creative idea that blew up.  Happens to all companies that are popular.  Microsoft, Apple and many others had similar issues.  Does one action make a company evil?

3) Folksonomy: useful system, or annoying Web fad?

I donât feel folksonomy, tagging, will go far in search.  You can see it being abused already with Yahoo!âs My Web 2.0 – heck I have even tried to abuse it for fun.  Instead of explaining the issues with it here, Danny Sullivan blogged on it at  http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050630-101701. Maybe its the next keyword META tag, so maybe I would consider it a Web fad.

4) Is PageRank completely, forever, totally, "6-feet-under" dead?

Mostly, but I don’t think Google would ever completely remove PageRank from its algorithm.  But there is absolutely no way PageRank is as important as it was two years ago.  PageRank is too much a part of Google’s branding for them to kill it, at this point. Plus, in my opinion, I think Google has too much pride to remove it.  That can be a bad thing, but I respect them for it.

5) The Linux logo is a penguin. I think penguins are cute. Do you like penguins?

I am more of a FreeBSD fan than Linux.  So I will have to go with, I think devils are cute. Actually, devils that ear apples.