Received this morning the e-marketing newsletter from Mike Grehan detailing a new article released today entitled "Filthy Linking Rich and Getting Richer". No, its not a synopsis for a MTV story on the a filthy rich spoiled celebrity, it's about those that are rich in links, and why they will continue to be so. He "highlights how great the bias is for high ranking pages which are fundamentally ordered on link based algorithms, to attract more links." The article is a wealth of information in regards to current trends going on. Mike backs up the article with plenty of research data obtained from the last 7 months.
He describes the metholodology as "an experiment carried out covered data collected over a seven month period. And from that experimental data, they observed that the top 20% of the pages with the highest number of incoming links obtained 70% of the new links after seven months, while the bottom 60% of the pages obtained virtually no incoming links at all during that period.
I believe Mike's article is very accurate, and I do agree as its something I have seen myself for quite sometime without the complicated theories involved. I was telling someone Monday, that its now 5x harder to start a new website than it was 8 months ago and be successful at it. It doesn't mean its not possible, but the stakes are higher. Mike puts it in terms we can understand and quantifies the results to make it valid. Interesting and very worthwhile read.
There is a continued discussion on this article at SEW forums - Filthy Linking Rich
