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Rand’s Interesting Questions

Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz has raised some really good points with his 8 more SEO topics that have me stumped.  His topics were:

1. Does QDD Give an Inherent Boost to Negative Subject Matter?
2. The 302 Hijack is Back?
3. Are the Engines Following URL Shortening Services?
4. What Was Up with The Hyves Subdomain PR Penalty Checker?
5. The Engines All Regularly Follow Many More than 100 Links Per Page?
6. Is it Really Harder to Get Rankings with a .info, .cc, or .biz Extension?
7. Does Google Employ Link Buying Moles?
8. Will Anchor Text Value Pass Through Terribly Low Quality Links?

And here are my thoughts on them:

1. I’ve certainly seen instances of this happening – negative blog posts ranking highly, but only in a way that suggests QDF is at play rather than QDD.  Explanation of the difference can be found here.
2. I’ve seen no evidence of this
3. Not sure, but will be testing
4. I really don’t know.  Being in the UK meant I missed out on seeing this in action.
5. I think Rand’s thoughts on this are pretty logical, and match what I’ve seen in other cases not related to links.  Google seems to handle certain elements differently between websites according to the trust / authority of each given website.  Therefore I wouldn’t be surprised if Google doesn’t crawl past 100 links (perhaps less) on pages on new domains, but will crawl many more links on pages on established domains.
6. Had to work with one of these domains once and it was hard work – it was a long time ago, when Google’s sandbox was in full swing, and the domain was new.  Perhaps it was sandbox related rather than TLD related.
7. Sheesh,  I dunno.  I wouldn’t have thought they’d go to those lengths, but surprisingly they do seem to be having problems dealing with this issue algorithmically
8. This is a really good question.  Page Rank not passed, but anchor text benefit is passed.  I’d say this is a definite yes from what I’ve seen, especially with certain websites on the Digital Point Ad Network doing well at the moment.  This would be a real good indicator that anchor text value on low quality links is being passed.

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Tags: SEO