Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Last December Matt Cutts, Head of Google WebSpam Team, wrote a post which impressed me indeed:
Tell me about your backlinks [mattcutts.com]
Here is part of what Matt Cutts wrote at that post:
My favorite overall moment was when a totally legit company (micromatic.com) stood up and asked for advice. Overall, their site was great: good architecture and very crawlable. They had lots of really good backlinks, including industry-specific links. But I could also tell that they’d been buying some backlinks. And they were buying backlinks from the exact same place as one of the earlier sites! At the point when in a minute of typing, I can say: you guys are both trying to buy backlinks, and I can tell that you’re buying them from the same network, and here’s an example page from ketv.com where both of you are even on the same page, and it’s not doing you any good at all: that just made my day. Having a concrete demonstration is so much better than just making a claim, especially when one of the sites says beforehand that they’re not doing as well as they used to be. I told micromatic.com that they had a great site, so they should stop trying to buy backlinks and spend more money to reward their inhouse SEO who had done a great job on the crawlability and architecture of the site.
When you read that post you might get the same impression that I got; Google knows and penalize buyers and maybe also sellers of Backlinks. Not so, unfortunately.
However, it just happened that I know of a site (not mine) which purchased backlinks during the first 4 months or so of 2006. I know from which sites the backlinks were purchased. And I know approximately how much was paid for most of the purchased BLs. No rel=nofollow was applied, of course.
Then the current indications of PR update arrived. And I checked the PR of the site which purchased the said BLs.
WOW... boost in PR from PR4 to PR7!
And I checked the PR of the sites which sold the BLs.
WOW.. they retained their high PR!
Am I the only one who have noticed Google rewarding sellers and buyers of BLs?
Have you noticed the same?
Your feedback would be highly appreciated.
that our kind fellow member Matt Cutts has posted this morning on his blog
Matt Cutts wrote
Matt Cutts wrote
Matt Cutts wrote
Matt Cutts wrote
If Matt told you dancing on your head around a bonfire while sprinkling fairy dust on yourself and chanting "I'm a Cuttlet, I'm a Cuttlet, I'm a Cuttlet" would improve your TBPR, would you do it?
Or would you think *for yourself* and base your beliefs on your own testing and research on *multiple* sites.
Just because Matt writes something (and Matt is a decent guy, so no foul on him intended) does not make how YOU INTERPRET what he wrote to be gospel.
It also has too many bolded words and things in double quotation marks
Face it, Google can tell some backlinks are paid because they are not subtle in the least. And Google cannot tell some backlinks are paid because they are relevant to the content and other links on the page. That's it. No secret really.
At some point we take our internal PageRanks, put them on a 0-10 scale, and export them so that they’re visible to Google Toolbar users.reseller, that only says the obvious. We already know there's a ten point scale. That's all it says.
C'mon Martin. You can do better :-)
Your comment was:
The GREEN BAR on the TOOLBAR is NOT PageRank.
While Matt is telling us that it is Google's internal PageRanks which has been exported to the Toolbar. I.e the Toolbar at some point represents Google's internal PageRanks converted to scale 0-10.
Matt Cutts wins!
"I'm a Cuttlet, I'm a Cuttlet, I'm a Cuttlet" :-)
Can buying links help a site? Yes
Does an increase in PR in the toolbar indicate a site has been helped? No (The part reseller doesn't seem to get)
Will Google penalize sites who buy links? No, because then I would buy links and point them to my competitors. The only thing Google will do is make them not count.
Will Google penalize a site selling links? It has stated that it will make the outbound links carry no trust. Not really a penalty, it just doesn't help the site buying the link.
Can Google detect every site selling links? Never. It's easy enough to see a site selling 35 links on the homepage, but how will it ever be able to find the ones with only 2 links on the home page. How can something so small look unnatural?
So in the end, who cares. If you are mad that your competitors do it, too bad. Either buy links or don't. Your going to make more money working on your own products / services then you are crying about Google not being able to detect your competitor buying links.
That is all.
....dancing on your head around a bonfire while sprinkling fairy dust on yourself and chanting
This doesn't work? Sh**! - it's time for a new SEO plan I guess.
I'm surprised there is still so much debate about buying links as it seems to me the following is pretty clear now:
1) Google has several ways to catch "paid links". For those that think this is difficult keep in mind that they have *people* as well as algorithms over at Google. Simply acting like a link buyer for a year would yield a huge database of sites that sell links. Once you know THAT you can devalue all/some links from those sites.
hey, isn't that pretexting like HP does to it's Board? Naaahhhh
2) Google clearly states they don't want to see paid links except for traffic. They don't detail how they penalize for selling or buying them but they probably penalize sellers and ignore most buyers.
3) Google sometimes fails to find paid links. My personal guess is that they catch more than 70% but less than 90% of paid links and are improving. For that reason alone IMHO it's a questionable SEO tactic.
I'd add that I think Google's approach to links and SEO has many defects both moral and strategic. Link trading, relevant and not, was a cornerstone of early web development, but now it's discouraged by Google. This has distorted the way people link. Adsense has totally changed the way most people produce and market web content.
Toolbar PR is a snapshot of PR from as many as about 3 months earlier, and even real and high PR does not confer good placements if the site is hit by other filtering. Only the SERPs tell if that plan worked for them, and it may mess them up in the future.
I sincerely feel this could ultimately be a very slippery slope for GG or any public search organization, not to mention expensive.
Thanks
Matt Cutts - 1
WebmasterWorld - 0
Reseller, why you'd believe Matt Cutts over experienced, seasoned seo verteran's is way, way beyond me.
We make money off natural results, Cutt's makes his money off Google ads. He also does a great job of keeping the SEO information in the hands of the few that know.
Thanks Matt!
_______________________
The only valuable metric you have in the whole seo world is ranking and traffic. If the PR whatever link that was bought increased the rank it was a good buy.
Google can totally automate the detection of paid links but that's another thread all together.
I sincerly doubt Google could start penalising PR links from industry authorities without destroying one of the metrics they use to rank websites and also changing the natural growth of the web.
Just stay ontopic and make sure where you buy your links from is staying ontopic as well.
[edited by: Bennie at 2:55 am (utc) on Oct. 4, 2006]
Google can totally automate the detection of paid links but that's another thread all together.
No they cannot, as they cannot verify money has changed hands. In that regard they don't have a clue that the two links leaving my homepage to two other websites are paid, or that I simply really like those sites.
The whole use a noindex nofollow link for links that are paid is ridiculous IMHO.
CainIV, I do believe Google have the right to do as they please. And they ARE.
If you read a little deeper into my post you will see that Google cannot devalue certain blocks due to relevancy. This is where you want your links (well that and some virgin grounds... No point playing SEO follow the leader like so many do : )
If Google comes across a block on some network with links to irrelevant sites there are so many ways to 'sniff' from there it's not funny. They are not penalising you, simply dumping the rank. No biggie, your just dumping $$$ for no reason (yer, yer I buy links for traffic too).
CainIV: Set yourself a large budget, go have a play and report your findings back to WebmasterWorld. Pick two evenly matched domains (same age, different but similar links and the same page no and topic), on one buy all your links from blocks and content on domains pushing mixed and unrelated topics. On the other stay ontopic and make sure the page your buying from stays ontopic.
Then you might see what is devalued and what's not.
[edited by: Bennie at 5:08 am (utc) on Oct. 4, 2006]
I never disagreed that Google cannot sniff out large scale network linking.
I noted that Google cannot sniff out whether or not the two (or 3, or4) links leaving my homepage are paid or unpaid.
CainIV, I do believe Google have the right to do as they please. And they ARE.
Maybe but this doesn't change my view that Cutts asking webmasters to use the noindex, nofollow is ridiculous. If the 'relevance factor' will filter out websites that link to unrelated websites in Google, then why tell anyone to add the tag, as Google will filter that out and pass no weight anyway.
Smells a bit fishy to me.
[edited by: CainIV at 5:53 am (utc) on Oct. 4, 2006]
DiBergi: "Why don’t you just make 10 louder and make 10 be the top number, and make that a little louder?"
Nigel (after taking a moment to let this sink in): "These go to 11."
Anyone with eyes can draw a general correlation between TOOLBAR PAGE RANK and site prominence as defined solely by backlinks. That's nice, isn't it? We can all see the TBPR of CNN or CNET or Wikipedia and be assured that PR is alive and well.
And it is. PageRank is alive and well. Feel better?
Oh, wait. I forget to mention one or two things.
One important one is that TBPR is sorta like a ghost of what might have once been there 3 or 4 or more months ago. (New sites can get out of the so-called sandbox before TBPR is updated from one update to the next. A lot can happen in 3 or 4 or more months, all around the Web.)
Another thing is: If we assume that TBPR is reflective of current true PR (a provably false assumption), actual/current PR only appears to be important if a lot of other factors are also in place. And even if a lot of other factors are in place, straight, basic PR has only modest importance.
There was a time that if a link was pointed to your site from a high TBPR page, then you were in great shape. Didn't even much matter if the topic of the linking site was relavant to your site, or the link text said anything meaningful, etc.
But then it did start to matter what the link text said. Then it started to matter if the linking site was relavant to yours, if their onpage factors were relavant, if they were on the same "C" block, if they reciprocated links, if the linking site shared too many backlinks with your site, and a wide array of other factors.
So, understand that TBPR is like a mirage of a site; that the real PR may be quite different now; that we're not even sure if the visible TBPR get's distorted to keep us off balance (I'm not certain, but others think so ... I just don't think they worry about it being that accurate); and most importantly and most honestly: Based on the many sites we have, and help, and our SEM activities to date, I would far, far rather get a solid one way inbound link from a high ranking competitive TBPR 2 page, than a reciprocal link from a TBPR5 page, or a one way link from a TBPR 5 page that is only vaguely related to my site and DOES NOT RANK for the terms that my site seeks to rank for.
And as for the naive assumption or belief that buying links doesn't work (assuming it's done effectively), well, that is just flat out wrong and always has been. Don't confuse what G would like to see happening, with easily observable reality (or worse, insist that observable reality is not true.) That just wastes everyone's time, eh?
Rock on Reseller. And have a glorious day. ;-)
