The Age of LINKS

Patience is not always easy. Whether you're sitting in a traffic jam, saving for a house or waiting for your SEO efforts to pay off, time can sometimes last forever. With SEO, our efforts are rarely rewardly over a short-period of time. Not only does Google favor well-aged sites, but well-aged links as well. This is a sad but true fact that exists because of link spammer. In fact, most of Google's little rules and penalties are thanks to all the people out there trying to cheat the system. But back to links....

With the enormous ammount of blogs, forums and Wikis out there, links can be dropped just about anywhere. Google and other search engines are well aware of these methods, and therefore apply very little weight to new links. But after a good ammount of time, if the links aren't removed, the SE's start to assume that the links are genuine. How long does it take? It's anyone's guess, but the general idea is to be patient. If you've just gained a prominent link and aren't seeing any results quite yet, hang in there and eventually your links will become relevant.

Quick note: MSN has dropped Pinbottle from #1 to #2 for "Boston Website Design." I anticipated more of a significant drop, since Yahoo dropped us from #3 to #21 since our keyword density dropped with the changing of our homepage. This is interesting, since it's assumed that MSN cares more about on-page optimization than Yahoo, but these results show just the opposite.