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The recipient sites are now dominating the SERPS as a result <snip>. Whats worse is that out of the few companies that are dominating the serps 5 or 6 are owned by the same person/company. All pretty much with duplicate content(different templates).
This site selling text links will sell link to anyone provided they pay in excess of $4000 per month.
They dont "SELL" PR like search king did but its obvious what they are doing.
Is this an acceptable practice these days?
[edited by: NFFC at 7:09 pm (utc) on Jan. 28, 2003]
[edit reason] No specifics please [/edit]
On the other hand, if you are going to pay $4000 per month you better be sure you are going to get top listings (know exactly what you are doing).
I would never trust such a game ...$4k for what? To get booted after a month? Ph... ouch ...
So true...
I contacted a related site about text advertising and they said "since you are clearly interested in just getting your link crawled we can put a link on the bottom of every page...
Fact is, I just know that the text links worked and was interested in one included with content.
Google is way too important...
Buying/Selling PageRank just for PageRank is foolish (particularly if the ads promote it that way).
If a penalize or ban occurs - did the person get what the paid for, or is it now false advertising? If the PageRank was PR8 and now PR5 will the seller offer a refund, or does the buyer take their chances?
Promotion PageRank for sale is bad business.
Google has created the value of links and people are just exploiting that value.
Good luck to them I say.
[edited by: aek at 7:23 pm (utc) on Jan. 28, 2003]
How many PR9-10 sites do you know of that link to other sites? Very few. Like adobe, microsoft, dell, etc. They usually only promote their own products/services.
Surely Google could check up manually on PR9-10 sites that have external outbound links to see if anything fishy is going on.
If Google started manually checking links they would realize that a huge amount are fishy.
All else-
Buying or selling a text ad surely will not result in a penalty. SearchKing was differnet in that they advertised the fact that they were selling PR.
Google now controls the way sites can sell their ads or who is appropriate to link to? I would love to see one example of this.
If you do not fit that status, you are an amateur spammer, asking for attention :)
You do not need PR 8 and PR 9 to rank well for the most important business.
If I can purchase a text link for less than half the price and five times the traffic of some banner, that is good advertising to me. I find it an acceptable practice, thank you very much.
Who, in their right minds would possibly believe that a site should be penalized for offering text ads, the most unobtrusive and effective advertising available?
Also, how would Google possibly seperate links that are being bought and sold from any other? I see Brett has a link to WestHost.com- how would anyone know if they paid for it or not?
Only if you sell male potency pills and make more than $4000 in profit per month.
Doesn't anyone learn from the king?
<edit>generalized my example</edit>
[edited by: stuntdubl at 8:32 pm (utc) on Jan. 28, 2003]
did you ask whois first? ;)
Westhost is the hoster of this great place. It's pretty normal and honest to give them a credit link. Don't matter if it's a paid link or a free link.
Let's read the initial question of this thread again. nervous spoke about a cheating (or at least fishy) offer ... not about placing a credit link.
Who, in their right minds would possibly believe that a site should be penalized for offering text ads, the most unobtrusive and effective advertising available?
It would seem that this was SearchKIng's beef with Google - e.g. that they paid for & sold links based on PageRank.
Then when things changed (and obviously someone was upset about that change) they attempted to sue to (I don't know) recoupe losses.
Basing your business model solely on someone elses makes that someone else a lead player in your business.
Frankly I like my business being governed by me. ;)
SearchKing called their program a PR ad network and claimed to sell PR. What does this have to do with a site, high or low PR selling ads, be it banner or text?
Yidak,
I have no idea what you are talking about and am quite sure you are confused. Whois has nothing to do with anything. Answer the question- how can anyone tell if the link is paid for or natural?
SearchKing called their program a PR ad network and claimed to sell PR. What does this have to do with a site, high or low PR selling ads, be it banner or text?
Nothing in itself... however, I assume your post was referenced to the topic of the thread "Buying PR".
This wasn't gently, so i'll move on to some other thread. You'll get your answers anyway. ;)
BTW: i'm Yidaki, not Yidak.
[edited by: Yidaki at 9:52 pm (utc) on Jan. 28, 2003]
People have sold links since the beginning of the web.
I read an article that said Sergei Brin regards
SEO's in about the same manner that a mother bear regards a person poking at her cub with a stick.
So when the Google bear swings it's paw....
don't be in the way, unless you want to get hurt.
That having been said, if a site of whatever PR wants to sell a text ad, that's OK too. I'm not convinced that in this case the site is selling PR. They are simply selling advertising on their high PR pages.
If you think someone is effectively buying PR, you can always report it to G but they may not see it that way. If you are thinking about buying text ads just to get your PR up and you are considering doing it at that price, consider hiring someone to go out and get links for you instead. You'll probably get just as much PR and lots more traffic.
how can anyone tell if the link is paid for or natural?
This is not a direct answer, BUT, Google employs some of the smartest people around. These people think about this sort of thing for probably 12+ hours a day. Just because you cannot figure out a way to definitely do it in 5 minutes, does not mean that they can not come up with a way that has a high likelyhood of success in 3 months.
One thing that a lot of people forget is that they do not need to be 100% accurate. If they are 80% accurate one way or the other, their SERPs are fine. Will some innocent sites take a hit? probably, but the seaarch results will still be improved, which is what matters to google.
As you are talking about going after a PR9+ site, there will almost certainly be human oversight before anything happens, but don't doubt for a minute that it can happen. In fact being a PR9 might just make it easier for them to do whatever they might do. A PR9 page loaded with totally random links? That is what most people would consider to be a useless page in the results, just remove it.
