For those of you not content with Google’s present level of omnipotence, here’s more for you to chew on:
Google Blog Search Now Reads Links on Web Pages: “Today Google introduced some changes in the way they index content from blogs / RSS feeds.
Earlier they were only using links from RSS feeds to determine the resultset for link: operator but now they consider links that are mentioned on web pages as well very similar to Technorati.
This means that if another blog (abc.com) has linked to your own blog (my.com) from his sidebar, Google will now show abc.com in the results as well when you query for link:my.com.
If there were a Technorati Rank like parameter for Google Blogs Search, almost every blog may have seen major fluctuations in their rank due to this simple change.”
If you do your affiliate marketing via blogs (or even RSS), take note because this will definitely have an hand in determining your site’s PageRank as well as its organic rank.
The bigger question is how this might (in the long term) affect affiliate marketers. Affiliates necessarily rely on links as the lingua franca of doing business because the nature of the economic model. Will Google slap affiliate sites with too many commercial (affiliate) links in the search results?
Fun stuff to ponder on Halloween!