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.
Does Google Reward Backlinks Buyers & Sellers?
In terms of PR: Maybe
In terms of rankings: Maybe
I'll try to explain my point of view:
A couple of months ago, I started out a test on this topic. I bought a PR6 link for a PR0 page on a PR1 domain. After the last PR update, the page where I bought the link from still is a PR6.
- Did my PR go up? Yes. The single page went up to a PR5, while the homepage remained a PR1, a couple of other internal pages went from a PR0 to a PR1. I ended up with a PR1 domain, with PR1 internal pages and a single PR5 page.
- Did my rankings go up? No. For the main search terms of the page, it does not show up in the top 1000.
My conclusion (I know it's only a single point of view and the test could have been much better, but I'll try to give one anyway):
If the TBPR still is close to the actual PR at the time you buy the link, you could get rewarded in terms of PR. (that's why I said 'Maybe')
In terms of rankings (and that's where 99% of us make our money), PR is (I guess that's what the most are trying to tell Reseller) absolutely not related to it. If that was the case, my PR5 page should be ranking in (at least) the top 100. If I had bought dozens of high PR links, my page could end up ranking in the top 100 (that's why I said 'Maybe'), but I didn't want to run a test for 1000s of dollars.
So unless you are making money by selling PR links, I would invest my money in my website in stead of buying links for PR. I know that might sound a bit like a white hat sissy boy, but that's my $0.02.
Isn't all black and white here.
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.
These 2 statements of Ecaterina and Murdoch say it all.
And there is not necessarily a "boosting" or "rewarding":
To just not value a link is not penalizing, and just counting one link among others is not necessarily a boosting rewarding.
Apparently G has set up an algorithm to detect backlink buying schemes -- just for the large scale ones I guess, and yet unsure about their coverage. Surely not 80%. Perhaps 40%? 30%? Or even less?
So what? Just fly below the radar and all will be fine -- until they get a better radar.
Kind regards,
R.
And here is one for the FAQ:
Q: "How does G know if I *buy* a back link?"
A: "They send their crawlers to major banks to check all accounts listed in the banks' sitemaps for suspicious payment transfers once a week. And depending on your 'Payment Rate' (aka. 'PR') you get penalized or not."
Apparently G has set up an algorithm to detect backlink buying schemes -- just for the large scale ones I guess, and yet unsure about their coverage. Surely not 80%. Perhaps 40%? 30%? Or even less
I just wish to hear from any fellow member that he/she is aware of a PR10 site or a PR9 site that has been subjected to Google's "lose their trust in search engines" argument.
And of any site that has been subjected to any kind of "devaluation" because of purchased backlinks from a PR10 site or a PR9 site.
Thanks a bunch in advance.
If links have value in terms of TBPR and rankings, then some paid links will have value in terms of TBPR and rankings. You can't have one without the other. And it's the ranking part that matters.
I just wish to hear
<mini-rant>
I have to say, this kind of request still makes my eyes roll back into my head, though at least it no longer amazes me.
We've been doing what we're doing since 1997. By 2000 we had over 100 sites. We pay close attention to over 20 categories. We've had the advantage of watching how the major updates and minor tweaks of the SE algos affect our rankings. We experiement like crazy, with 10+ site that sit out there on the edge of things, bobbing up and down in the SERP's, providing information all the time about where the lines are...information that is increasingly hard to come by.
Reseller, you want that kind of information? My advice is: Pay more attention to the actual SERP's.
</mini-rant>
Here's what I can share (most of well known to those who were paying attention): Just about a year ago, G's ability to devalue backlinks was becoming increasingly well known and public. We had been buying text links already for years at that point, as we continue to do now; not primarily for PR, but for traffic. And that tended to lead us to the sorts of sites associated with higher PR. The purchase of those links in preceeding years had certainly given us a boost in the rankings. But well before one year ago, we started noticing declining rankings for a cluster of sites that as it turned out had reallly only one thing in common. They were all supported by aggressive link buying.
At first we thought it was just an algo change. The more we looked, the more it seemed to be the link buying. So, we took a well established site with lots of backlinks and went out and did a nice, sharp, conservative link buy from a PR9 site. This was a particular kind of site that had drawn the attention of the SE's but we did not know that for sure yet.
Anyway, that was the last time we did THAT. ;-) Even my sharpest algo person thought we'd been penalized. Nah, it was just that that site, and others like it, were too reliant on bought links from high profile partners. What felt like a penalty for a while was simply the effect of a substantial amount of our total link juice being devalued. Live and learn. Hehe.
Also worth noting, around a year ago, a site that we sold links from lost its ability to pass PR. That was a bad day at the cave. By then we'd already more or less developed new philosophies about linking strategies. That was the day we started implementing them. Since then, it's all been good.
Want proof? Do what we do: Start paying attention to the actual SERP's, and stop believing every little bit of spin and lobbying that you hear. That way, you won't have to guess, or goad people into sharing the details of their hard earned knowledge. Also: Learn to see the many shades of gray between black and white. ;-)
You are the greatest :-)
Thanks for your spirit of sharing, always!
Want proof? Do what we do: Start paying attention to the actual SERP's, and stop believing every little bit of spin and lobbying that you hear. That way, you won't have to guess, or goad people into sharing the details of their hard earned knowledge. Also: Learn to see the many shades of gray between black and white. ;-)
I will take this opportunity to clearify few points.
First off, I wouldn't consider my first post in this thread as indication that I'm believing spin. However, it seems that some of the folk just forgot to read it. Allow me to bring it back for a while:
Hi FolksLast December Matt Cutts, Head of Google WebSpam Team, wrote a post which impressed me indeed:
Tell me about your backlinks
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.
Honestly Caveman and Folks. Do you find any believing in spin at the above post?
Then there has been some remarks that I/we should listen to the SEO specialists and their preaching about Buying backlinks, PageRank effect/no effect etc..
Sorry for not doing so. Reason?
SEO Specialists don't agree among themselves about anything. Good for them :-)
And as to listening to our kind fellow member Matt Cutts. I do that while keeping in mind that in addition to being a nice kind person, Matt is a Google employee too and sometimes he has to say what he is supposed to say.
Wish you all a great evening and God Bless.
What was the unanswered question again?
Oh yea - reseller - did you actually check if the paid links actually affected the serp position of the non competitor site that bought the links?
I'm just curious, because if they didn't change the sites position in the serps - what was the purpose of the purchase?
If you just want more greenline TBPR to look at - here's a thought.
You can buy a green marker pen, for substantially less than the price you are paying for your links now.
Then you can make your site a PR15+ on your monitor. Won't help your ranking in the serps........ but you'd have a HUGE green line to look at......
Honestly Caveman and Folks. Do you find any believing in spin at the above post?
Yes.
Reason? You seem complelely "WOW"ed by something that those who have been reading posts on the topic and paying attention to the SERP's have known with relative certainty for, ummm, OVER A YEAR. ;-)
Resller I don't mean to pick on you so hopefully you won't take it that way.
This stuff is not news for those who've been paying attention, looking at SERP's, and reading about the topic. People have been buying and selling text links for ages now. Some pretty big players are making good livings just brokering such activity. What has changed over the last year or two, as a result of market experience and observation and information-sharing on the boards, is the way it's done. And that too has been pretty widely discussed over the last 12-24 months.
I'd also like to call attention to sugarrae's excellent post on link building [webmasterworld.com], by including a snippet that seems relavant to your questions, here:
Old:
Buy links on any site with pagerank hoping the engines will see the links and think wow, your site must be great to be linked from such a popular site. Even better if you can get a range of site in the bottom footer and get 5000 links for the price of one. Just find a big network with a stable of link sellers and buy from their handy dandy list.New:
Buy links to get the resulting traffic and having that link placed somewhere on the page where visitors will actually see it and pretending search engines don’t exist when debating a purchase. And if you’re going to buy a link, make private deals with site owners or use brokers who do the same with a very limited clientele of purchasers.Example:
If you wouldn’t purchase a link if it had a link condom on, then you have no business purchasing the link without one. Buy traffic, not green pixels on the Google toolbar. You will need to sustain a link for a long period of time to get maximum effect and you can’t do that if you’re not getting any ROI from your purchase. Enough said.
There must be something wrong with my latest purchase of Cappuccino, since you haven't got my points yet :-)
Shall do another honest attempt. Lets walk this together point by point:
- Forget for a moment the serps
- Forget for a moment anything to do with ranking on the serps
- Forget for a moment anything to do with SEO and SEM
Lets focus now ONLY on the following points:
- TBPR shows at some point the internal PageRanks at Googleplex, converted to 0-10 scale.
- High PR sites selling backlinks
- Low PR sites (say PR4, PR5) buying backlinks from above to boost their own PR.
- Matt Cutts claims: "Google’s stance on selling links is pretty clear and we’re pretty accurate at spotting them, both algorithmically and manually. Sites that sell links can lose their trust in search engines."
NOW......
- a site of PR4 purchase backlinks from high PR sites.
- PR update take place
- the said site start showing PR7
- the sellers sites retain their PR
Which leads us to the following conclusion:
- The high PR sites has passed PR (trust) to the low PR site
- I.e neither the high PR sites nor the low PR site have been subjected to " lose their trust in search engines" as Matt claimed.
- I.e Google has rewarded the backlinks sell/buy operation
- I.e Google is unable to police/mandate its own Guidelines.
Are you still with me, Caveman ;-)
I'm not sure how the question posed to you could be made much clearer, yet you have dodged it every time...
HOW DO THE BUYING SITES RANK COMPARED TO HOW THEY RANKED BEFORE?
TBPR does not matter. It does not matter if TBPR is 4 or 8 - TBPR is not a "benefit" it is a PICTURE MADE OF PIXELS ON A GREEN BAR THAT BRINGS NO FINANCIAL BENEFIT SOLELY ON ITS OWN UNLESS YOU SELL LINKS TO SEO'S WHO HAVE NO CLUE AND BUY LINKS SOLELY BASED ON PAGERANK. No one is debating whether the sites retained or gained green pixels in the pretty little bar on your screen. What is being debated is why you think it *matters*.
You have been asked twenty times in this thread and have never answered, so I REPEAT:
HOW DO THE BUYING SITES RANK COMPARED TO HOW THEY RANKED BEFORE?
HOW DO THE BUYING SITES RANK COMPARED TO HOW THEY RANKED BEFORE?
What has the process of passing PR (due to sell/buy backlinks) from one site to another with ranking to do?
- Forget for a moment the serps
- Forget for a moment anything to do with ranking on the serps
- Forget for a moment anything to do with SEO and SEM
Otherwise you would get tired of keep typing those big fonts of yours :-)
Hey reseller. I do believe that you are a unique breed of button pusher. ;)
Anyway, forgive me, I'm a little slow on the uptake sometimes. In this case, I understand you. I'm not with you, but I understand you. My comments FWIW:
NOW......
- a site of PR4 purchase backlinks from high PR sites.
- PR update take place.
I think you mean, a TBPR update, which is a snapshot of an on-going process .... a snapshot taken at least several months earlier.
- the said site start showing PR7
- the sellers sites retain their PR
Again, I think you mean TBPR, which is not the same as PR. Whenever I see someone freely exchange those two acronyms I worry that they are not fully with the program.
Which leads us to the following conclusion:
- The high PR sites has passed PR (trust) to the low PR site.
Couple things. First, please do not mingle notions of trust and PR. They are almost entirely unrelated. They are related insofar as they both involve inbound links.
PR is only about links. If a big PR page links to you, it increases the PR of your page. You don't know if TBPR reflects actual PR, so you cannot know what's really happening, though I agree you can make educated, directional guesses about a page's PR.
Trust is about a lot of things. Quality one way inbound links from relavant sites is one, but there's a whole lot more to it than that.
So, let's say that in all likelihood, yes, the bigger PR page has just passed PR to the lower PR page.
... conclusion:
- I.e neither the high PR sites nor the low PR site have been subjected to " lose their trust in search engines" as Matt claimed.
Well, again, this has nothing to do with trust. But, it sounds like in this case the high PR page passed PR to the lower PR page. The lower PR page received higher PR as a result.
Now, keep in mind that this, if true, is pretty much business as usual for the experienced link buyer. Got that reseller? NO NEWS HERE. You keep trying to make it news by contrasting this to what MC has at times said. But those who've been buying and selling links, and those who've been paying attention, know what's really up. They know that certain kinds of link buys can be wasted or even (IMO) trip filters. And they know that many, many link buys are effective.
Side note: I believe that over time, link buying will get harder and harder. tedster said earlier in this thread: "But for several years now, they have had a mechanism that allows them to stop PR transfer in any particular case that they do identify. I've sometimes been amazed at the situations where they have applied this - would never have guessed it myself."
IMO G will continue to get more sophisticated on this front, because they want to.
... conclusion:
- I.e Google has rewarded the backlinks sell/buy operation.
Ah, well. This is complicated. If you mean that operations brokering the buying and selling of TLA's are doing OK, then that is true. But without speaking for them, I think they would tell you that the smartest link buyers now pay far, far more attention to site and page relavance than they do to TBPR. And that's because the smart link buyers know that the game is no longer about PR. It is about getting relavant links from relevant sites, and structuring those links to stay "under the rader" of the SE's.
Of course there are the less well informed that still pay attention to TBPR and think it means a lot. But those are the types that make me, martinibuster, sugarrae and a host of others shake our heads. We hate to see site owners throw away good money. ;-)
... conclusion:
- I.e Google is unable to police/mandate its own Guidelines.
By Jove Reseller, I Think You've Got It!
Or at least part of it.
Someone the other day asked me what G's single most potent weapon is, in the war against spam. My personal opinion: Matt Cutts. And I mean that in the most complimentary of ways. :P
Reseller, as it seems you are unable to live in the reality of "grey" and everything must be viewed as black and white,
Here are your choices.
A.) MC lied to everyone about bought links passing PR, being against Google guidelines, blah blah.
or
B.) MC is woefully un-informed and should never be listened to.
Note - this seems the only way to explain the "phenomena" in your eyes, no?
(Personally, I would choose the latter but I've been saying that for sometime anyways. :P)
Now, my suggestion is to come out of SEO childhood. Stop believing that Santa MC is all-knowing of who's naughty and nice and rewards them appropriately. Just like "real life" the world doesn't crumble when the belief in Santa Claus goes away. One is still able to enjoy the "illusion" of giving not-so anonymously while knowing the reality.
Caveman did an excellent job of describing the world of grey.
Why are you soooo insistant on calling out Matt.
My goodness, he's on the WEBSPAM Team, not the chief architect of the algo. Heck, not even the engineers know for sure how the algo will help, hurt, recongnize, not recognize, every variable they want.
Why do you think there are several DCs with varying results?!?
Engineer Team A wants to reward/punish this type of site, link, behavior.
Engineer Team B wants to reward/punish another.
Google has the questionable philosophy of running this changes "live" to see what the general affect is and whether to keep it, toss it, or tweak it a bit.
Why do you think you have thread after thread about "I dropped from #3 to #400 and now am back after algo tweak"?!?
What exactly do you think is happening?!
--------------
Other illusions that one (aka every webmaster) might want to re-examine:
* Yes, G's PHD engineers are smart. They are able to do things that are nearly inconcievable in the IT world.
They are not all-knowing gods of all things related to internets, computers, and techno-geekiness. Let it go. A PHD is given to anyone who goes to school long enough and has the creativity of a 5 year old to come up with a different doctorate.
Google did not buy up every smart thinking individual in the world.
And they certainly do not prevent any half-witted Joe webmaster from examining the SERPS and the ranking websites thoroughly and noticing what "works" and what doesn't and employing those techniques for their sites, no matter how much G may officially endorse or dislike the techniques.
* As soon as you "tweak" a title tag, an anchor text, a meta tag, send out an article with backlink for syndication, get a directory listing, or whatever, you have officially entered "grey-hat" area. This SEO-propaganda surrounding white, grey, black hats in sooo 3rd grade, believing-in-Santa, when's-the-tooth-fairy-bringing-me-money thinking.
Want to be a "true" white hat, go build a site like YouTube or Myspaces that doesn't rank for crap and doesn't have to. Or build a company like Apple and Dell and rank for the term "computers" with unoptimized flash animation and graphics.
If you want to change the term "white hat" to "obediently applies Google's (Yahoo's or MSN's) current guidelines, which may change according to the whims of the next update", then fine.
Otherwise, you are "grey hat" aka "webmaster who has various of degrees of risk-reward behavior in order for their sites to rank for various terms"
[edited by: whitenight at 10:11 pm (utc) on Oct. 4, 2006]
I think you and Caveman have a script that generates long posts :-)
On the other hand sugarrae has a script that generates big fonts :-)
Thanks a bunch to all my kind WebmasterWorld fellow members for their todays contributions to this great informative thread.
God bless WebmasterWorld community!
Good night!
