A long time ago it became apparent that google relied heavily on anchor text - that is, the words that were used in external links to a site. So if I wanted to rank high for ‘great SEO blog’ I would make sure that people linking to the site used that text in their link [...]
During the last 12 months or so google have dealt several blows against sites that ‘trade’ in pagerank. Pay per post blogs, web directories, and sites obviously selling links have been the most heavily penalised because of their attempts to manipulate search engine results.
Often the impact of penalties is hard to assess, because usually sites [...]