I interviewed Charles Floate, an SEO known for ranking websites in ways that go against Google's spam guidelines. We discussed PageRank and the importance of links in Google's algorithms. Charles revealed ways he's been able to manipulate Google's guidelines and succeed, though I don't condone such practices.

Our chat helped me reform my thoughts on links and their power to move the needle for rankings. Links are most definitely important in Google's algorithms and will likely remain the core for quite some time. But as Google develops new ways to identify quality content, most of which comes with AI innovations, I believe PageRank is not as important to SEO as it used to be.

In this video Charles shows me how he is able to get sites to rank. Some of what he is doing is actually improving E-A-T!

I must reiterate that breaking Google's policies can lead to serious consequences While good links can be powerful, building your own links is often either ignored by Google, or can cause manual or algorithmic penalties which can be very difficult to identify and recover from.

My hope with this video is not to encourage blackhat SEO tactics, but rather, to talk about the power of GOOD links and how that power is much more than PageRank.

Thanks for doing this, Charles. I enjoyed our chat!

Charles Floate on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/charles_seo

https://www.youtube.com/user/D4rkHacking?app=desktop

Marie’s info:

https://twitter.com/Marie_Haynes

https://mariehaynes.com/contact/

Contact Marie for a referral to companies that can help you get good links and mentions from authoritative sites in ways that comply with Google’s guidelines.

My book on auditing links (used by many agencies to train their link auditors).

My book on using the Quality Raters’ Guidelines as a checklist for site quality.

Wix SERPs Up Podcast with Mordy Oberstein and Crystal Carter:

https://www.wix.com/seo/learn/podcast