Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
So I pinged Google, and they confirmed that PageRank scores are being lowered for some sites that sell links
and
In addition, Google said that some sites that are selling links may indeed end up being dropped from its search engine or have penalties attached to prevent them from ranking well
and
Google stressed, by the way, that the current set of PageRank decreases is not assigned completely automatically; the majority of these decreases happened after a human review.
Seems like big news to me. Did I miss someone pointing this out already?
[edited by: tedster at 5:32 am (utc) on Oct. 9, 2007]
[edit reason] copied from another location [/edit]
If Google were to abandon PageRank, "TrustRank,", and the like, what other automated method could it use to decide which of a hundred or a thousand identically relevant pages about "widgets" or "Elbonian yurts" to display on page 1 of a SERP? Calculating keyword density to the fifth decimal or counting keywords in ALT text won't do the trick. For practical reasons alone, PageRank and other link-related factors are here to stay, so Google's gotta do what Google's gotta do.
I would think people go to the web cause they want the most up to date info on a subject. New domains can't rank partly cause they are new and partly because they have no links in. How can that be good for a search engine. One reason I liked google back in the old days was because they were always first to list the new sites.
One reason I liked google back in the old days was because they were always first to list the new sites.
And they were even more dependent on links then than they are now. The issue now is that they are being heavily gamed. If they reverted to their early-days algo, the results would be seriously bad. There are significantly more non-link factors and semantic factors in the ranking algorithm now than ever before.
When it comes to new sites, Google does get them in the index very fast - and even gives them a honeymoon period of ranking in many cases. If they do well right in the beginning, then the sites tend to continue to show in the rankings.
Also, in the early days, Google had a couple million urls indexed, not billions. The web is not the same web as back then.
I don't like the way this paid link thing is unfolding right now, but I do understand the need for Google to do something. A simple PR block would have been an even-handed approach, in my personal view. But hand editing PR and even penalizing/removing domains for suspected link selling - well that seems a bit over the top to me. I do think Google has the right to do this, but I also think it's misguided act.
I also doubt that any of the "big boys" were surprised by this move.
They are still performing well in the serps.
It appears that the PR9's and PR8's that they bought are giving them the reduced PR8-7, which is still enough to perform well.
I am guessing, if I was siting at the plex, I would have put the screws to both.
Item 2 was the nail in the coffin even before G started making noise about paid links. There's nothing like hosting a sold-out block of paid links and knowing that the advertisers are never going to leave, because they got a sweet rate by signing up early. Making matters worse, G starts talking about the potential cost to the publisher (devaluation) - bye bye paid links.
I may try this again, with rel="nofollow", selling them directly - the advertisers will know, up front, that I'm not selling PR, the links are for traffic only.
My take is that Google is looking for widespread nofollow compliance from the link sellers. If that happens, then link buyers will get no ranking advantage from their purchases, but they still can buy links for traffic, advertising and branding purposes. Of course, the link market's pricing would probably go through an adjustment.
That has always been Google's stated aim - they say: sell and buy links all you want, but don't try to manipulate your Google rankings that way.
I'd love to sit around the "strategic meetings" that Goog has to discuss these issues.
"Employ a FUD campaign for a couple of months and hope we can scare off the people who have been gaming us for years?"
"Let's do it for real and seriously affect our results and our alliances with companies that affect our profits by 10-100's of millions?"
"Naw, let's throw everything against the wall and see what sticks"
"Who cares! MSN and Yahoo are complete donks and Adwords, our real product, has considerable room for market penetration. We're invincible!"
<everyone enjoys the evil guffaw of hubris, having insane profits, and no real competition>
It is still early in this game - but yes, I certainly noticed that Google's first big move was aimed at the link sellers. That only makes sense to me. It would be a very touchy situation for Google to go after link buyers, since competition could then easily aim purchased links at their rivals.
Yes, that makes perfect sense to me also.
It will be interesting to see what happens to the serps for the more competitive keywords/phrases when Google turns the knob up a notch on this (and they will, in time).
I can foresee the cry's for a "Google Massive Update" thread when that happens.
I think a small percent of the current chat in the Oct 2007 update thread is related to this, not many people are currently posting: “oh, yeah; and I also buy PR links...,” but who would?
Exactly, linking is just one factor, one that people can easily game, so why not just get rid of it or at the very least turn it off for a month. There are plenty of other factors they can base rank on. If they want to stop people from trying to manipulate the serps they should come up with 3 or 4 good algos and rotate them. Nobody would know what to optimize for from one month to the next.
Exactly, linking is just one factor, one that people can easily game, so why not just get rid of it or at the very least turn it off for a month.
Linking is harder to game than titles, anchor text, keyword density, etc., especially now that Google doesn't give equal weight to all links of the same PageRank.
How easy is it to buy links from sites that Google trusts?
So I pinged Google, and they confirmed that PageRank scores are being lowered for some sites that sell links.
and
In addition, Google said that some sites that are selling links may indeed end up being dropped from its search engine or have penalties attached to prevent them from ranking well.
and
Google stressed, by the way, that the current set of PageRank decreases is not assigned completely automatically; the majority of these decreases happened after a human review.
Sometimes these topics can go all over the place and by the time it gets 6 pages deep, the original meaning gets a bit distorted.
The emphasis above is mine. Some sites that are selling links. Its obvious who Google are targeting. It surely isn't Mom or Pop who just sold a couple of links and are not part of any link inventory. And it probably doesn't apply to those that have been doing it for years as part of their "standard business model".
Based on what is being reported, the sites at risk are those that have been "blatantly" rubbing it in Google's face.
Google mentions that the bulk of this is being done through human reviews. We've all heard about the force of 10,000. I'd have to surmise with that many Human Reviewers, you could "easily" infiltrate a bulk of the link inventories in a very short period of time. Let's call them GoogleMoles. ;)
If you are caught up in the entire "link commodity" process, then you may be at risk for what is being reported. If not, then don't worry about it. I surely wouldn't be making any knee-jerk reactions at this point in time. Not unless of course I had thousands of dollars tied up in "link inventories". I'd be a bit worried then. ;)
Everything at Google is all about patterns. Patterns of traffic, patterns of behavior. Patterns of click fraud, patterns of conversions. Patterns of patterns.
And about marketing and psychology. As EFV said the odd policing action combined with some statements please write fresh content, we are so nice at the plex.
Google mentions that the bulk of this is being done through human reviews. We've all heard about the force of 10,000. I'd have to surmise with that many Human Reviewers, you could "easily" infiltrate a bulk of the link inventories in a very short period of time.
In one patent, Google talked about using as few as 200 "seed sites" to spread TrustRank across the Web. Wouldn't the neutralizing of links from major sellers' sites have a comparable seed effect, in this case by spreading loss of "link juice" rather than gain in TrustRank? That would be reason enough for focusing on easily identifiable link sellers and not worryiag about the small fry.
That has always been Google's stated aim - they say: sell and buy links all you want, but don't try to manipulate your Google rankings that way.
Buy and sell any companies you want, partner with anyone you like to grow your business, team up with the smartest programmers, but don't try to inflate your stock price by hiring the best public relation specialists.
they say: sell and buy links all you want, but don't try to manipulate your Google rankings that way.
Well sort of, what their saying is; you can buy and sell links all you want BUT only if you add this little bit of code; rel="nofollow so you can make us feel a little better about the fact our algorithm has this huge Achilles heal that people are taking all kinds of advantage of.
I don’t buy or sell links so I’m not worried about any penalty or what the little green bar looks like for my sites. But the problem I have with their approach is the fact that when you have this sort of situation it’s the guys who are doing exactly what they don’t want them to do that will benefit from all this. The less true “linking” going on, the more the people with the “links” are going to benefit. That’s what’s going to happen, the bold will be rewarded and the conformers will be set back. (prohibition anyone?)
Look at it this way, if you read a story in the newspaper about how some guys walked into a huge bank, found no one there and the vault wide open and they walked off with millions you would think 2 thoughts;
1.Those guys were dishonest.
2.The people in charge of the bank didn't really have much of a plan to avoid this.
As long as link pop so easily helps bring you to the top there will be link manipulators. I’m all for Google trying to clean this up, I really am because on the flip side, the people I see really having a go at high rankings today are the link buyers. (The harder it becomes to rank in Google, which it certainly has become over the last few years, the more raw link power helps) I just don’t see how this approach is going to do anything but fuel the people on who never gave a rats ass about Google’s guidelines in the first place. Conjuring up thoughts of Matt Cutts rapping link sellers across the knuckles with a drop in tool bar PR for being naughty boys just isn’t going to turn manipulators into alter boys.
Can selling links hurt your PR or Google rankings? Right now only if your clueless or arrogant. Like a previous poster said, the guys they are targeting with this have just been rubbing Google's noses in it; it's not going to even put a dent in the other 99% of those in the link trade who actually know what their doing.
But now, as every day passes, I am finding more and more sites that are part of my daily routine that have been hit with this penalty.
Everything from Mom-N-Pop PR6 sites to large PR9 Organizations.
Mind you, I am not looking for them, I am just seeing it.
Taking a look at their Alexa ranks for the past week confirms a +/-50% drop in traffic for each one.
I am now thinking that the number of sites hit with this penalty is rather large and not confined to what was just the obvious.
Here are three examples:
One is a former PR9 .org site, a king amounst kings in a well known field. They were #1 for a single key word with over 1 Billion (Yes, that’s 1,100,100,000) results..., now they are not appearing at all for that word.
They have 20 sponsored links on the bottom of the index page, with the wording “Sponsored Links” as a jif file. Some of these links have text around them, some do not.
Another was a former PR8 that has text links sprinkled around the index page with supporting text, and some real spammy ones in the footer. This site also cannot be found for their key words.
Finally, a former PR6 site that is commonly used by webmasters for seo purposes. It has several text links on a page with very little other content, other than a seo tool.
All three have taken big hits according to Alexa this week.
I got a call last week asking if there was a charge to be listed in my directory. The site has been up since 99, there is an add url form on the site, there is no charge and I have never had a call like that before. Made me wonder if it was the big G checking up on me. Maybe i'm just paranoid though.
Paid Directories , Are they the next target?
Matt Cutts has made this very clear, well,,, as clear as anyone who speaks Googlise.
[mattcutts.com...]
Q: Hey, as long as we’re talking about directories, can you talk about the role of directories, some of whom charge for a reviewer to evaluate them?
A: I’ll try to give a few rules of thumb to think about when looking at a directory. When considering submitting to a directory, I’d ask questions like:
- Does the directory reject urls? If every url passes a review, the directory gets closer to just a list of links or a free-for-all link site.
- What is the quality of urls in the directory? Suppose a site rejects 25% of submissions, but the urls that are accepted/listed are still quite low-quality or spammy. That doesn’t speak well to the quality of the directory.
- If there is a fee, what’s the purpose of the fee? For a high-quality directory, the fee is primarily for the time/effort for someone to do a genuine evaluation of a url or site.Those are a few factors I’d consider. If you put on your user hat and ask “Does this seem like a high-quality directory to me?” you can usually get a pretty good sense as well, or ask a few friends for their take on a particular directory.
[edited by: kamikaze_Optimizer at 10:57 pm (utc) on Oct. 12, 2007]
If they added something to the algo to take these sites down a notch or two...
It is my understanding that this is much less of an algo and much more of a human review.
For a high-quality directory, the fee is primarily for the time/effort for someone to do a genuine evaluation of a url or site.
To me that means real paid directories are not considered to be selling links, they are charging a fee to review and categorize directory listings and they will not be a target - unless they get innocently caught in a filter, but as far as human review they are safe...for now.
To me that means real paid directories are not considered to be selling links, they are charging a fee to review and categorize directory listings and they will not be a target - unless they get innocently caught in a filter, but as far as human review they are safe...for now.
Isn't the proof in the pudding? That's the impression that I get from MC's remarks (especially the final part of the quote about a user's sniff test).
High quality directories charge thousands of dollars a year for listings. It's an advertising fee because they have high traffic for a particular market.
In that case, neither they nor their customers are likely to regard the "nofollow" attribute as a dealbreaker.
Also, if those directories are already getting high traffic because they're recognized leaders in their markets, they aren't likely to depend on Google for continued success. They can go on selling links and not worry about the possible loss of Google referrals if they decide that "nofollow" isn't worth the bother.
High quality directories charge thousands of dollars a year for listings. It's an advertising fee because they have high traffic for a particular market.
Thousands? For a directory listing? I am not sure I have every seen a directory listing priced or valued this high in any market.
