Phirate - Link Grid

12/27/07 17:51

It is certainly possible that copying the grid over and over again across the web could result in the sites that have made copies getting identified as link farms, but to be honest, I suspect it's not all that likely.

The fact is that google et al deal with these things on a statistical level that make a thousand links in one article a mere blip in the system. It's unlikely to do anything to anyones rank anywhere.

At worst, those sites running a copy of the grid are going to find their PR or something dropped a bit, but unless their site consists of nothing but the grid, chances are good that any reasonable blogger has a thousand links on their blog over the past few months anyway.

To be honest I believe attempts like this to manipulate rankings are much more likely to simply fail to work - any of the places where you really care about your rank have at least a small team dedicated to making sure stuff like this doesn't affect the viability of their ranking system, and the grid is as trivial an example as you could imagine, simple to filter out.

I created the grid purely for fun, to give myself and others an idea of what we've achieved, and who we are, after a month or two of operation.

I don't encourage people to duplicate the grid for a much more practical reason: it'll get out of date fast :) If you really do want to have it on your site for some reason, go ahead, but add the nofollow directive to the links (find and replace should do it easily) and make everyones life, including the search engine ranking teams, easier.