lfgoal - 8:17 pm on Feb 23, 2007 (gmt 0)

"If a search engine will impose penalties based on what they consider paid links then once again competitors would be paying for one way links to drown their competitors."

Makes sense.

"The fact that a site owner would have to ask an advertiser to place a nofollow on a link in order to prevent a risk penalty or loss of rank really goes a long way in telling me how fragile the system really is at Google."

I agree. The google system depends quite a bit on the fact that the vast majority of website owners are very much out-of-the-know. If every website operator was as savvy as some of the brighter minds here, then their whole ranking system would collapse overnight.

There are two things that chiefly bother me about the contextual blog link thing.

First,if your competitors do it, get good mileage out of it, and start beating you in the serps, you're faced with a choice: stay out of the water or jump in. Either way, you may be taking a risk. That's a terrible burden for this "company" to inflict on people.

Secondly, and this is the more relevant issue for Google, what if the integrity of google's search results becomes damaged in the more commercial/popular/user-used niches? What I mean by this is, what if, in certain areas, all the crap begins to rise to the top? (a lot of it does anyway, right?)

If the crap managed to successfully rise above the sites that SHOULD be positioned high (due to the quality of their content and the quality of their back links), who does that benefit? It definitely benefits the owner of the crap site that bought tons and tons of contextual blog links and it benefits the company that brokered these purchases----however....

It doesn't benefit the white-hat sites (that have the quality content and the quality backlinks, all hard-won) that worked their butts off to get where they are, and, more relevantly for Google, it doesn't benefit the users.

If users keep finding crap surfacing to the top of the serps, they will begin to rate their own google experiences differently. And they will do what people every once in a while tell me they are doing: they will try other engines.

Google knows this, that the user experience is the most important aspect of their business. If users find crap in the serps, they will start looking elsewhere. And it is for this reason that I wonder if google will tolerate this.

Whether they will tolerate this, however, and to what extent, may depend on how successful this program is (I imagine it will be very successful for the broker). The more successful it is at influencing the serps, the more attention it will draw from google. And, personally, I'm just not sure if I'd want that kind of attention.