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I certainly don't want to do anything to jepordize my association with Google. Still, I think I should be freely allowed to take ads from other companies.

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Do you think I should write and ask Google about it?

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I have 2 clients - one is a woodworker and the other an attorney - that are good friends and want to help each other by offering a link. that is a real world situation

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If it were me I would place the link inside a short paragraph describing the service.

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So, have they done so? Do they both also use AdSense?

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Regarding linking absurdity, the original post I referred to was from a SEO humor blog called Sem Antics The piece was poking fun at the predicament that many new webmasters find themselves in, which in a nutshell comes down to: “It takes links to rank well, but you need to rank well to get links.”

In the pre-millennium days, search was the primary method used to find quality sites to link to. And providing your visitors with a broad selection of good off-site links was the norm. Someone with fairly basic SEO skills could launch a new site with good content and have a good chance of being found by other webmasters looking for sites to link to.

My Father is a perfect example. He put up a little website in 1997. When the site first went up, there were probably less than 100k pages on the web that contained his keyword phrase. There are now close to 10 million. Yet despite the dramatic increase in competition, he has managed to stay in the top 3 across every engine that ever existed during that time. He survived Black Monday, Florida, and all three Jaggers without a scratch. And he doesn’t really know squat about SEO. (Other than how to write a title tag).

His survival is due in large part to the 2000 or so quality backlinks he managed to obtain over the years. The makeup of his backlinks includes everything we strive for as SEO’s. Links from large news agencies, major .edu’s as well as other authoritative sites in his space. And the best part is the fact that he never paid or bartered for a single link. All he did was write articles.

The problem we face today when it comes to Google is the fact that link structures similar to my Father’s have become the base model for what is considered the ideal “natural” link map. On the surface it’s a great idea because these types of sites do contain great content and for the most part put very little thought into SEO. However, their ability to grow “naturally” only existed because they didn’t need the links to gain visibility in algorithmic search engines.

Once you take away algorithmic visibility, that ideal model collapses pretty quick. It would be virtually impossible for my Father to replicate what he’s done online if he started from scratch today. Google has become so restrictive when in comes to new content showing up in SERPS that he would have no chance of ever being found.

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I'm curious. Isn't it better to have external links open in new windows? I see Tom doesn't.