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Is it really unethical to buy PR?
I personally would sell my Grandmother for a PR8 link and have been thinking a lot about the morality of doing so.
I think the real problem people have is that they have worked very hard to get where they are and them someone comes along and buys a better rank.
Money has always and will always be a short cut - those who toil hard to achieve something always have to face that there are people who can wander in and achieve the same thing with a wad of cash - after all at some stage someone worked hard for that money - so maybe money is like a token of hard work already done?
I would appreciate peoples feedback on this - am I just convinving myself that something unethical is right coz it suits me to or is the 'unethical' stamp just sour grapes?
BTW She really is a sweet old lady - comes with a secret recipe and all, any offers? :)
Flame suit on!
Regards,
Brent
Seriously though as Google can decide that this practice or that practice is unethical and take your earnings to 0% it has to be considered.
Example: Yahoo $299 to purchase "PageRank"... well no we purchase the link right... what's the real difference?
The advertisement of the sale to the buying market.
If you put all the people on one side of the world that would buy a link...
and on the other those that would buy PageRank... the world would flip upsidedown since most online users have no idea or concept of what PageRank is.
A little like me advertising to you... "hey I got a Fas-One-Bravo for sale"... would you buy it?
[edited by: fathom at 2:31 pm (utc) on April 10, 2003]
Fun member name, and also quite funny about your Grandmother. Is she a member here as well ... I hope not for your sake ;-)
You question is intresting, I myself and have taken the hard road and have actually had to work for my pagerank. Imagine that ... ugh ;-)
None the less in my most competative field there is one webmaster that is paying pennies to be listed on hundreds if not thousands of sites within a network. This has pushed his pagerank on numerous sites he or she owns to pagerank 6 and 7 sites.
This person is making huge ... huge money.
I am tempeted to join the club, and purchase one of these fancy "boost your pagerank link" however in doing so incures great risk.
Remember the expired domain google update of about a month or two ago? In updates leading to that one if you had purchased a expired domian name you had a bunch of pagerank to push around as you saw fit, regardless of where the pagerank came from. Now if you do the same google simply "strips" the inbound links to a expired site.
I would sure hate to buy a link only to watch a site get in trouble with papa google.
Me thinks I will standby and keep working for my pagerank ;-)
Brian
If google want's to sell it, it's not. It's a free market economy.
WHAT'S the "REAL" concern with PR? How does it help a site? Is it just a way for Google to measure the "?" of a site.
I see too many posts on here on PR this and PR that and always, 90% of the the response is something to the effect of "Work on your site to make it user friendly".
So, why should one spend any time on PR? It's not something we have any control of.
Any thoughts?
Spinner
A link is supposed to be a "vote" for another site, "votes" = PR.
Purchasing votes inherently smacks of a lack of ethics. After all, if you have to buy a vote, it means that the site you're purchasing a link from would not have voluntarily linked to you and voluntary linking is what PR is all about.
IMHO: Purchasing PR is akin to using spam tactics. I say this because both unduly manipulate a rules based system and through this manipulation gain an unfair advantage over those sites "playing within the systems rules".
Fathom - Fas One - who now? But I'm assuming that's the point? Incidentally what is a Fas One Brava? Regarding 'those in the know' - surely it is only those in the know that are being unethical in the seo world - ie how can you be unethical if you don't know how? Therefore those on the other side don't matter in this case - I'm not sure I said that very well!
Chef Brian - Thanks :) She's not really the forum type - last time I showed her a computer she sat talking to the mouse.. Googles current policy is never to punish a site that is being linked to / as opposed to doing the linking - so the risk you're talking about is paying for a link until google punish it - then dropping it when no longer valuable?
The first election in recorded history, in Greece, over 3,000 years ago, was fraught with vote buying.
George Washington bought votes, paid a tankard of beer for every vote in New England in the first electoral college election. Lyndon Johnson won his first election to congress in 1948 by stuffing the ballot boxes in his home county. He got to be president. No one ever threw him in jail. Politics and human history is filled with spam, back thousands of years ago.
Spam is not an Internet invention, the net borrowed the term from history. Why should the net be any different from the real world?
There are no laws against internet spam. There are laws against voter fraud and vote buying in elections, and it still happens all the time and politicans get away with it. How can anyone expect to control internet spam when there are no laws against it, when the government can't even control vote buying and human spam WITH laws?
I don't do spam by the way, it annoys me. But I doubt that it will ever disappear from the net. As the years go on, spam and PR buying will get worse and worse. That's my prediction.
People who have the most money will get the most exposure. It's the way of a free market society - advertising goes to the highest bidder who plays dirty tricks.
[edited by: nadsab at 2:58 pm (utc) on April 10, 2003]
A link is supposed to be a "vote" for another site, "votes" = PR.Purchasing votes inherently smacks of a lack of ethics. After all, if you have to buy a vote, it means that the site you're purchasing a link from would not have voluntarily linked to you and voluntary linking is what PR is all about.
Is a link a vote or an endorsement? Votes aren't supposed to be bought, but endorsements are bought & sold all the time.
[edited by: dwilson at 2:51 pm (utc) on April 10, 2003]
c1bernaught - I suppose the problem becomes the wonderful idealogy that they created when it hits the real world or even the virtual world in a business environment takes a bit of a nose dive in the practicality department?
On the buying PR thing, not sure how I feel about it. As GOOGLE (I think it's them) has placed so much on PR, this is begining to form it's self as another type of business. When Yahoo "sells" you a link (in their Db), what are they selling? PR or Visitors. Let's just say it was Visitors, but their PR gave you a boost, what's to stop a site from selling their PR. We won't directly give you "hits", but will help your "PR" on Google and as Google is "KING S---" now, go for it..
Right or Wrong?
Those sites are now GROSSLY overpaying for their PR6's and 7's.
I expect that google will put more importance more low PR links more than a few high PR links as the next few updates progress making purchased links more and more over priced.
Eventually, I imagine they will penalize. Ouch. That will definitely COST money and not MAKE money, so be careful.
Perhaps buying votes has been around forever. It has also been illegal and unethical forever.
However, ethics is not about what is legal.
I find it interesting that you defend spam so vigorously. Do you advocate spam?
Isn't it webmasters that are placing so much on PR? :)
IMHO - PR = clever marketing ploy = very little if any effect on ranking.
If anyone wants to buy PR, you may also be interested in these magic beans I have for sale.... ;)
Scott
Page rank is essentially a measure of the quality of your information or services as judged by other webmasters. If you purchase page rank you are engaged in misleading the public since you will appear to have a higher quality of information or services than you do. This is a question of ethics, which has to do with right and wrong (rather than with profit/loss or legal/illegal) so the purchase (or sale) of page rank is clearly unethical.
In terms of information, if the chain of links represents information on the web, then a bad link (one that leads to irrelevant or bad information) damages the integrity of information on the web. This hurts everyone, and is probably unethical in the same sense that falsifying the results of a scientific experiment is. Both lead to feeding false information into a system.
I think you underestimate the power of a high PR link.
jcorronela - good advice - I think what it boils down to is that we need to keep it short term and roll with the punches
Cheers to everyone for the advice - at this point I might take a mosey over to the PR aisle and see what's on special today ;)
And of course anyone wanting to let me know what's out there can sticky me - I really don't know where to start!
Just take a look at the really big companies out there - are there sites as well optimised as some of the little guys? Definitely not all of them..
Now I'm back to square one...
You can justify your behavior any way you want. Your question was about ethics. If you buy PR you are acting without etchics, period. Acting in such a way will only net you short term gain.
It seems you were simply looking for support for a decision you had already made.
Good luck.
Non-commercial sites don't want to look like an ad farm with links to commercial sites, and commercial sites don't want to link to other commercial sites for fear of losing the customer to even an indirect competitor.
So I shop & pay no more than $25/year to be listed in industry-related directories with >PR4, mainly because sites w/ >PR4 probably don't want to do anything cheesy to lose it.
These links bring me a few focused customers in a very high-margin industry, plus a little PR power, and I put a little money back into the industry. Keep it clean & focused and everybody wins IMO.
Lol!
I will admit that the high PR links can send more traffic to a site than a lower PR link, but that's about it.
PR is nothing more than a unit of measurement - do you really think Google place that much importance on it?
How many threads have you read with people saying that their PR7 is sitting on page 3 of the SERP's while a PR4 was number 1?
If PR was a relfection of the content of a site, then I would believe it was a major factor in ranking in Google's index. Remember content? That's the stuff Google are so keen to put a lot of importance on.:)
But as it is, PR is only a representation of inbound links. We all know how many people can fake that. A lot get away with it. There are a hell of a lot of webmasters and SEO's who focus on PR.
If you (as a business) were Google, would you let this factor that you cannot control and many others can manipulate, be a major influence on the quality of your product?
Perhaps to begin with if you believed in it. But as more and more people abuse the system, then the less and less importance PR will play in rankings.
So why have it?
1. Keeps webmasters focused on Google (great branding....great!)....
2. Hmmm....so you want to index the whole web? What about all those sites that aren't in the index because they have no inbound links and Googlebot cant find them? It would take a lot of work for one company to get all the websites to link to each other, wouldnt it?
Hmmm.....so how could we get websites to link to each other, without any expense?
Let me think....... ;)
Scott
I am very indecisive on this point and your post suggests I've wasted everyones time on a decision I'd already made?
Lighten up ;)
Fathom - Fas One - who now? But I'm assuming that's the point? Incidentally what is a Fas One Brava?
A Jezebel system.
Or more commonly -- a passive acoustic Sonar... used on submarines... but ya you got the point perfectly! :)
[edited by: fathom at 3:33 pm (utc) on April 10, 2003]
The real question is: does buying PR violate Google's TOS? I think the answer is yes, Google disapproves as it weakens their search results. However, they have no automated way to detect this and thus, don't like to even acknowledge that this occurs.
