Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I seeing it time and time again. What would get you banned in the old days seems to be fine in the new linking environment.
For example they are going after paid links but tend to ignore people who run many sites and cross link, Infact they need to concentrate more on these cross linking than chasing paid links,
How do you define a paid link and "going after" one? A submission to yahoo's directory is nothing more than a paid link and generally in terms of traffic it's quite useless. I'd say most do it for the pagerank you pick up from the other-country mirrors so shouldn't google go after that one as well? Should they go after gimpsy, or joeant, or try to penalize those who are advertising on other sites?
How do you define a paid link?
Off-topic link from an authoritative site.
Ok. Take a site that ranks very high for the phrase "emt training". Let's say it gives a link from it's main page to a site about "syringe sterilizers". How the heck is google going to know whether that link is on topic or offtopic? It won't and it can't. Google which is an algo doesn't it's ass from a hole in the wall and it certainly doesn't know that a site about syringe sterilizers is a valid link from a site that is devoted to emergency med techs. That takes a person with intuitive skills, not an algorithmn. And, frankly, when we say "authoritative site", we're just attaching a label to sites that happen to appear high in the serps for a particular phrase or word, and that is simply a function of pagerank, keyword density, IBL, and anchor text. That doesn't mean in any way, shape, or form that google actually "knows" anything about the sites ranking in one of any 100 million niches. So...short of isolating pay-for-inclusion directories, links that have the word "sponsor" next to them, and obvious link farms, I'd be surprised if they can easily detect paid links at all.
