I noticed that Google recently changed it’s guidelines to include the suggestion

“Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online”

I think this suggests that Google highly values any links your site obtains from other relevant web sites in your field. I think Google believes that if I make everybody in my field aware of my web site,  Google can judge how good it is by looking at how many relevant web sites link back to me.

Google valuing links from relevant web sites has always left me confused. Are links from relevant sites really natural? Often relevant web sites are competing web sites. Is it natural for me to link to my competitors web sites? Let’s take a simple example. Suppose I am a Dentist in Miami. I build a web site and optimize the site for the keywords “Dentists in Miami”. Does Google think it’s natural for other Dentists in Miami to link to my website from their website? Do they expect me to link to other Dentists in the city? Do they think it’s natural for me to want to help my competitors by improving their SERPS or sending them targeted traffic? I would suggest that often, highly relevant backlinks are in fact very unnatural.

Let’s read that guideline again. “Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online”. The more I read it the more ridiculous it sounds. If somebody builds a new site and contacts me about it, the only thing I am going to do is look at it to see if it contains any cool new ideas that I can steal. The last thing I am going to do is link back to a site that is better than mine. Shouldn’t Google lead by example and include a big, fat, juicy link to Yahoo on their homepage?