Let Google.com help you with your link building

Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 | SEO

A little while ago I did some searches on the internet and I saw something very surprising. In the Google result pages I saw some results of http://www.google.it/notebook. Well, how can this be? What’s the only way you can show up in the SERPs? Right, to get indexed. So, would it be for real that these pages on google.it were getting indexed by Google itself? It’s time for a test!

After a check on the robots.txt, robots meta tag and nofollows there seems nothing to be that exluded these public profiles. The next check was to see for how many pages it was about. This showed up that not only google.it/notebook was indexed, but all the Google Notebook pages were getting indexed. And if you do some research on these pages you’ll find some nasty/dark links…… Was this for real?

To test this I created a new page with some non-existing text on it: asdqwertyfgh. I put a link to it in my Google Notebook (click through to see the test page) and published it. Because I don’t think the notebook are indexed by themselves I added a link to it from my blog. And what happened? After a few days my new page was showing up in the SERPs and it still is right on top (including the notebook page itself)!

Google Notebook test

So, would Google Notebook help you with link building? To be honest I don’t think it will help in Google very much. When I put some tests on more difficult keywords the results weren’t very great. However, the results in Yahoo! and Live were totally different. A link to my friend Martijn with “local search optimization” as an anchor text moved his website (In Yahoo! and Live) from #7/#8 to #1. After removing this link he dropped again to #8/#10. So maybe Google filters his own websites in there own rankings algorithm, but it definitely seems to work in other search engines.

How long does it work? I don’t know. Does Google know about this? I think they do, but they can’t do very much about it for other search engines. So, don’t wait, get some Google accounts and boost your rankings in Yahoo and Live ;-)

Update: Google seems to watch these notbooks, because a lot of ‘dirty’ notebooks are removed and give 404′s now.

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23 Comments to Let Google.com help you with your link building

Julia - Blog Finder
November 12, 2008 at 11:23

Thank you for sharing this tip. I’m doing some SEO for my company’s website and I find your idea interesting. I think I will try it and see the result for my website.

Linkbuildr
November 12, 2008 at 23:20

VERY interesting Arjan. I know of some people who have been testing out various methods with the Google notes to see how they influence the serps. They’ve gone as far as creating a tool that uses different acounts and proxies, which is quite blackhat, but somewhat necessary for testing purposes.

I can imagine Google will start to put the notes to good use and help rank content out there.

Julia
November 13, 2008 at 11:27

Hello Arjan,

Just wanted to thank you for correcting my comment. I must have overlooked the mistake. You have a nice blog.

Karel
November 16, 2008 at 16:15
Arjan
November 16, 2008 at 16:18

@Karel: that’s right. With Google profile you can do the same.

Karel
November 16, 2008 at 16:20

By the way, check this link: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site:http://www.google.com/notebook+password&start=30&sa=N

Search for peoples passwords ;-).

Arjan
November 16, 2008 at 16:29

That’s right. It’s quiet amazing to see how stupid people can be. Martijn Beijk wrote about this last week: http://www.martijnbeijk.com/google-notebooks-and-security-a-wake-up-call/

Dennis Wijnberg (JR Online)
November 17, 2008 at 10:02

Very interesting this article! Eventhough I am wondering how long this will last.

Gerben Hoekstra
November 17, 2008 at 11:16

Very interesting!
I’ll do a test with the live search engine

herm
November 17, 2008 at 17:27

Nice, quick and fast (and it’s working)…

Private Label Rights Guys
November 18, 2008 at 17:49

Great idea but I am not sure how long google will allows us to do it.

But let do it now before google bans anything.

Victor at seoconsultants.co.nz
November 19, 2008 at 0:20

I am always amazed by the generosity of people like yourself in this industry, you would think that people that stumble over these gems would keep it to themselves for competitive advantage and yet time and time again they share with the community. Awesome Man I take my hat off to you.

Jasser
November 19, 2008 at 0:25

interesting!
i hope it will work with me to.
most of my blogs are in Arabic language so i hope it will have the same effect.

Arjan
November 19, 2008 at 0:28

@Victor: thanks for your comment.

It seems that Google let their notebooks get indexed by purpose, so I don’t think this will change in short time. And according to the minimal results in Google SERPs I think they took other actions on this.

So now it’s up top Yahoo/Live to do something with this. And after doing some research it seems that this story counts for more than a year so I really doubt if Yahoo/Live would something about this..

WebsiteJudge
November 28, 2008 at 15:19

Dear Arjan,

Are there also solutions to make this work for multiple pages (or for fast indexing of some sitemaps?)

Arjan
November 28, 2008 at 17:18

@WebsiteJudge: no :-)

bread
January 8, 2009 at 18:44

This tips really nice. Thanks dear friend. Absolutely I’ll give it a try.

Cheers!

gerrit
May 2, 2009 at 22:49

bedank ik probeer het uit op een nieuwe pagina en was vrij vlug in index dus ik denk dat het wel nut heeft

مصريه
October 23, 2009 at 13:12

thankes for all

Wilma
December 26, 2009 at 2:14

Tnx, worked good for me @ bing, my new websites get indexed faster with this ‘trick’.

stellar data recovery
February 4, 2010 at 9:20

good work arjan . Google notebook to increase the back links is really a good idea. I am in the process of increasing the backlinks of site and thank you for this information.

Albert
April 13, 2010 at 13:22

This is interesting. Thanks for sharing. Anyway people not caring to share their personal notes. Stranger (:

And do not create public notes only for SEO point of view, Just share your notes as like a public bookmarks, include everything, I mean, all of your bookmarking stuff.

Guia de Negocios
July 19, 2010 at 16:24

I´ll try it out!! Great tip!

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About Arjan

Arjan Snaterse Hi, I'm Arjan Snaterse and in my daily life I'm working as SEO and Frontend manager at Jaludo. There I'm working on casual gaming sites like Funny games and Titter girl games.

In my spare time I'm developing websites in Wordpress or Typolight. HTML standards, semantics and CSS are words that make me happy. So if you need someone who converts your design (PSD) to HTML/Wordpress just contact me.