Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
You can't turn them down for no reason, or even a vague reason such as Google uses (unless you have as much money as G), or they can sue you for discrimination.
How can you officially identify them and what can you do to pass advertising traffic which they paid for to them, but not be penalized by G for linking them?
<script>
function goto(url){top.location=url};
</script>
<a href="#" onClick="javascript:goto('http://www.badneighbourhood.foo')">Bad Neighbourhood</a>
Or similar. The very direct javascript links can be followed. But such as that can't, so far as I know.
And, under English law, AFAIK, when someone wants to buy something advertised on your site (e.g. a link) it is an invitation to treat, i.e. they are offering / proposing that they buy it. You don't have to sell anything to them unless you confirm that you want to, and you don't have to provide any reason for rejection. You might want to check the law in your own country.
The submission fee is clearly described as an evaluation fee, and if I evaluate their site and see that it obviously doesn't meet the submission guidelines (which are explicit), the site doesn't get listed and there are no refunds.
If it's a gray area where the site doesn't really conflict with the guidelines but I don't like the site for some other reason (or just feel uneasy about it), I cite the "refuse any site for any reason" line and refund the submission fee.
I haven't had any problems in over 4 years of doing business this way and I don't expect to. They're my sites, and I can link out to a site or not at my sole discretion.
How can I tell who's good and who's bad from weird Google's point of view, as my own personal judgement obviously don't count in this case.
If PR is 0 or gray, then stay away.
So, if I have a page with a PR 4 or 5, and decide that the page really, really, really would benefit from a name change, and I execute that change using a 301 redirect, you'll avoid me for the temporary duration of a Gray Bar or 0 PR?
No wonder my link requests have dropped off in the last two weeks... people must think I'm either shady or terrible at SEO with half a dozen very prominent 0 PR pages.
The point is that there are valid reasons for those conditions.
BTW, birdstuff is spot on. Set your Terms and Conditions and make them visible. You should have every right to reject any offer.
The hard part is vice versa: when a page is displaying good PR, but is considered 'bad'. For example, one of my sites has PR5, if you check it in Google, 208 pages are indexed, lot of backlinks, the page is in dmoz, Yahoo directory etc.. Nevertheless, Google penalizes me for smth. I don't show up anywhere in Google serps.
I have no idea what I am being penalized for, maybe for linking to somebody 'bad', maybe it's still sandbox effect (site is 8 month old) but anyway, that's not important now.
My point is: you'll never tell just by looking at my site that it's a "non-grata" in Google! Everything looks fine: PR5 for entrance page, PR4 and PR3 for all inner pages, but if you link to me you may get in trouble!
