[forgot_password]

Rand assumes that the top ranking sites today that produce great content got that way through white-hat techniques. I have no idea whether Zillow, Oyster, or Zappos never engaged in shady SEO practices and I doubt he does either.

Also, one minor addition...if your domain is naturally uninteresting, that should affect your competitors as well. One can argue that having an exciting domain that breeds lots of natural links is actually a bad thing for a startup because it's harder to rise over your entrenched competitors.

[teyc]

Rand does. He sells a web crawler service that does the same thing as Google's "link:" operator before Google closed it off.

[underdown]

Open site explorer is not a time machine. It's a snapshot of links TODAY. Your assertion is flatly false.

[InfinityX0]

Google is a snapshot of links TODAY. Links that no longer almost certainly pass no value. Rand is wrong about a few of the domains on the list, as they have done shady SEO in the past. Also, OSE.org is not a fluid list - it only crawls a sliver of the web, and their index is not nearly as comprehensive as Google's. It was updated a week or so ago, and before that, had not been updated for a month and a half.

[teyc]

Was Google's link: operator caching old expired links?

[chopsueyar]

Have you used it or are you talking out of your hind-quarters?

[teyc]

I'm not a customer.

ps. Please be civil. See Site Guidelines.