In a pretty under the radar move, Google removed two really important things from their Webmaster guidelines:

“Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open
Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific
expert sites. “

“Have other relevant sites link to yours. “

Initially, the buzz was over whether or not Google was finally going to officially separate itself from corrupt DMOZ and stop counting directory links altogether, but I think it’s more important to consider Google’s continuing ‘devaluation’ of linking in their official dogma. The reality is the opposite though. A search engine that has built its foundation on linking has to spend the majority of its quality assurance time filtering out poor and manipulative links. They did, however, leave in the guideline relating to engaging in manipulative linking.

“Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.”

A Google groups discussion began about it and some Google representatives did make comments about it. John Mu commented:

“This line was removed because we feel that you should not “force”
other sites to link to yours. Obviously it’s good that sites link to
each other, it’s fine to encourage that on your sites to link out and
to make it easy for them to link to yours. However, I don’t think we
need to make it a part of the guidelines that you should “have other
sites link to yours” — they should be willing to do that on their
own, it should be their decision not yours.

I hope that makes sense. “

This seems to be classic Google Utopian ideology. Fortunately for them, they are so big they don’t have to worry about getting exposure on the Web. So, not only is Google saying not to buy links, they are expanding their definition to cover being proactive and getting others to link to you. I understand that Google doesn’t want people polluting their system with piles of paid links, but they are really passing the ‘Web exposure’ buck here to other forms of advertising. They seem to believe that a search engine is NOT the place to get exposure.

If links lead to rankings and links should come exclusively as a result of good exposure, then according to Google, rankings should not be for exposure, but instead simply reflect existing exposure. There are millions of awesome Web sites out there that no one will ever see because they are ranked poorly and don’t use banner advertisements. I guess Google’s solution for those Webmasters is to use Adwords and help their stock grow more. Google is increasingly becoming a ‘what’s popular’ engine instead of a real search engine. Apparently, if you want to find new sites with good content, you have to stick with stumbleupon.