Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such.[google.com...]
are all these fortune 500 companies who buy links or sell them really going to drop out of the index.
If its that easy to hurt yourself with paid links, why wouldn't ALL your competitors do it to easily remove any page from the index they wanted.
These are the kinds of questions that lead me to believe it won't happen.
The ONLY way google can fix the current issue is to devalue ALL links. Keep the results relevant like they are now without backlinks being such an important factor.
Is google really going to throw quality sites down the drain because they have bought some high quality links on another high quality, on topic, extremely releveant website that passes a very solid amount of traffic?
Maybe. Maybe not. In any case, Google doesn't have to penalize every site that it suspects of buying or selling links for SEO purposes. By announcing its policy in the Webmaster Guidelines, Google is simply serving notice that it can and may penalize or devalue a site that violates those guidelines. I'd guess that Google will whack a few high-profile "quality sites" to set an example, and that most other sites getting penalized will be sites that have little TrustRank or authority status and won't be missed by Google's users.
Here's a related bit of history that I recently learned about. Apparently Google developed the rel="nofollow" attribute internally before it went public. Essentially, they were already identifying some kinds of links that they felt should not pass PR and internally, and then the algo was already treating them like a nofollow. That's how they worked up their proof of concept.
But can the algo identify a large percentage of paid links? It's not easy to say, but to me it seems hard to envision. It's not even easy to define what "padi" means, s many have observed.
The challenge Google faces here is also a political and social one, in addition to being an algorthmic one. My hunch is that they're further along in the identification step than many people think - but they haven't completely devalued all the links that they know about because of the social and political issues involved.
Whether we like Google's direction or not, they are quite up front and communicative about their intentions here.
they haven't completely devalued all the links that they know about because of the social and political issues involved
::Sigh:: this is all i've been trying to say for a year now.
Once one understands that Goog 2.0 is more concerned with the above issues, than whether their algo is "corrupted" or not, it provides a greater insight and understanding on how much concern you (the webmaster) should put into following or avoiding their guidelines for your business.
Not all paid links violate our guidelines.
It goes on to state they are ok if they DONT pass PR.
Which means no paid links that pass PR are ok.
I dont think they can harm major sites for buying/selling links. But it is something they are taking very seriously, and will likely have it better sorted in the near future.
I have purchased around 7-8 links from generic directories over the past couple of years - should I email those directories and ask to remove my site or should I be OK?
i have only submitted to directories which are well reviewed, well respected and recommended on seo sites. i have also spread the submissions out over the past 3 years and have no more than about 10
I bet come January Google will hammer a lot of sites that buy links to gain PR will lose some serious rankings or just be removed from the index.
waiting for sign of that in order to point my 10 million $hit links at all my competitors.
waiting for sign of that in order to point my 10 million $hit links at all my competitors.
So ... to blow a comeptitor out of the water all I have to do is buy a bunch of crappy links and link to them? That's SOOOO much cheaper than marketing for my own company.
Of course I'm being sarcastic. But it is true.
And what about all those *%&^!# scraper sites that we have NO CONTROL OVER. Crap pages of adwords with scraped pages with links to those people. How will that garbage affect our rankings.
Buy links? --
Google will try to make sure that they don't pass PageRank.
Sell links? --
If you let them pass PR, you may get hit with a true ranking penalty, and that's a lot worse than the current little smack on the wrist of a toolbar demotion to your PR.
The challenge I see for Google comes when a prominent site that people expect to find in their search results gets a strong penalty. The average searcher will not understand that. They'll just think the search results are crappy and Google can't afford to lose too much of their user base's confidence.
I wouldn't be surprised if such cases are handled more through personal communications and business meetings rather than solely by penalties and the algorithm. Of course, Google has shown willingness to penalize major sites to get them to shape up, so who knows?
If I see a directory show up in my searches, I make a note of them. Then I check them out to see if they are not too expensive and then I sometimes pull the trigger if I think there is some value. Its more than just a paid link I am also looking for traffic.
Now to punish me because I have a directory listing I purchased 3 years ago when it looked like it was becoming a popular resource is just wrong.
[edited by: Rugles at 10:08 pm (utc) on Nov. 30, 2007]
waiting for sign of that in order to point my 10 million $hit links at all my competitors.
You guys are making this way too complicated...
Simply put up a site (anonymous of course) saying
"Buy PageRank - Boost Your SERPs in Google!"
Put your competitors in the sidebar and footer under paid links and then report yourself...err.. have a "do-good-er" report you in the name of Google SERPs integrity.
Score 1 for the good guys.
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Edited to add -- ah the ideas just keep flowing.
Better yet, make some extra cash by advertising your services to others who want their competitors punished so there's no "footprint" of only your own niches.
Use javascript or cloaking to mimic direct links - just to make sure they perfectly *look* as if they were passing PR, while actually... they wouldn't be. HA. This way we can eliminate any accidental ranking gains of targeted competitors ( should the plan fail ), but enter the human evaluators and *bingo*
*smirk*
Gee, I wonder if anyone is already doing this. But I still don't think that Google will penalize sites that buy links, ever. They can't even sort out sellers with good enough precision.
But I still don't think that Google will penalize sites that buy links, ever. They can't even sort out sellers with good enough precision.
They don't have to. They can combine suspicion about links with other factors, cutting the site slack (or not) depending on the total score.
To put it in more graphic terms, if the site already smells questionable and there's a whiff of something suspicious about its links, the sniff-o-meter needle can creep from the yellow zone into the red zone. Users aren't likely to suffer or complain, because a "yellow zone" site already smells bad enough to be unappetizing.
And what if the site linking out is just a piece of spam set up for linking out? You can make 100 of those a day and google can't get them all.
In the mean time the good sites are being hit :)
All they can do is penalise the link selling pages not the site that is advertised. What a tedious job that must be for some human robot.
Jesus, some people!
I think the post was meant to be humourous. Certainly made me grin anyhow.
