Now, all of a sudden the massive garbage backlink trick seems to be working better than ever in Google. This is kind of ironic, given Google’s tough talk about paid link advertising over the past few months.

I am seeing sites ranking top 5 with 95% spam links, many of which are Russian or Chinese guest book and blog spam. This is the type of paid linking that gives the link selling industry a bad name.

On a personal level, we will be exhibiting at the WebMasterWorld tradeshow in December, so to get some idea’s for SWAG, I Google searched on the phrase ‘promotional items’. The number one site was one that reeked of poor quality – blossompromotions.com/ So I checked their backlinks in Yahoo and could not believe the garbage links that are boosting this site to #1. Here is a look at their backlinks: http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=linkdomain%3Ablossompromotions.com+-site%3Ablossompromotions.com

This may sound weird coming from LinkAdage, but I hope that Google gets better at spotting garbage backlinks or the SERPs will become quite a mess as sites with nothing to lose load up on crap links and the quality sites will get lost in the shuffle because they are spending their time getting relevant links on great websites. I am all for quality, on-target paid link advertising, but the garbage links helping garbage websites reach the top of the SERPs is a bit over the top.

Matt Cutts from Google has stated that some of the older data centers did not get updated PR because of infrastructure issues. When he first mentioned this at the November Pub Con, he also said that all DCs would be in sync early this year. As of today, we still have split PR.

So if you buy a link on a PR 7 and notice that some DCs on the Metrics Checker are showing something different, don’t worry, the PR reflected by the majority of the DCs is the “real” toolbar PR of the website.

While it has been extremely busy lately, if you can get on the LinkAdage Metrics Checker you can see what direction your site may be moving. If you are in the middle of buying, selling or trading links, you may want to pay close attention to PR if you are one of the PR obsessed.

It is worth noting, that the SERP changes reflected in this PR update took place about a month ago, this update is only Google giving us their latest snapshot of website PR.

If you would like to sneak a look at where your site may appear you can go to the Google test data center at http://66.249.93.104/. Remember, these are test SERPs and there could be significant changes before they go live. It is best to view them to see the direction your site is going, not where it will eventually end up.

Thousands of established sites were recently re-sandboxed during the latest Google updated dubbed “Update Jagger”. Many of the dropped sites were top-10 in Google for their money keywords for years, now they are no where to be found. SEOs and webmasters are scratching their collective heads wondering what’s going on.

LinkAdage believes the re-sandboxing of a website can be the result of many factors. You will need to look at your website and SEO efforts and try to figure out what factor caused your site to get dropped into the Google sandbox and out of the public eye.

Google is making a dedicated effort to list only the most dynamic, popular, authoritative sites possible in the top 10 for highly competitive keywords. So if you have a small site that hasn’t change much, is not sticky (return visits), and your backlink patterns are unnatural, you’re probably wondering what happened to your website’s rankings.

Here are a few of the long time basic tactics that should be avoided:

So how do you get back to the top? There is no easy fix, you need to get the right links, you need to entice people to make your site one of their favorites and come back often, and you need to offer something unique to the Internet community. Essentially, you need to become an authority site in your niche. This is no easy task and requires hours of time and devotion