Google paranoia or well founded fear?

charity donations and linking to donors

[loanuniverse]

Would Google frown upon this?

This year I am participating in a well-recognized national charity. To this effect, I placed a message in my site yesterday indicating that I would like my visitors to help and send donations directly to this charity. Today, I posted in another “webmaster type forum” that I was looking for donations, and that those who donated would be recognized in my front page with a link.

Within an hour I had someone post that this would make my site an FFA page and that both my site and the site getting the link would be punished. Now, I like Google and all that, but his whole argument seems hollow. Do you guys think that maybe we are getting a bit paranoid about the whole thing?…. Considering that:

1-By allowing Google to dictate something like that we are giving up a lot of editorial control, more than I would be happy to give up.
2-That the whole “do no evil” mantra would definitely apply here.
3-That I did a search and found at least four organizations that link to donors in a 3-minute google search and this does not seem to have hurt them in the rankings.

I know that it is best to be safe than sorry, but this guy’s post kind of blew away my whole online fundraising plan.

Who do you think is right?

[edited by: Marcia at 4:17 am (utc) on Feb. 9, 2004]

[DaveAtIFG]

Who do you think is right?

A better question might be, "What do the SEs think?" ;)

An associate that operates a well established and respected charity site has been including links to her site's sponsors for nearly a year now with no ill effects. She limits the program to about 50 sponsors to avoid being identified as a link farm.

PR dropped from 7 to 6 for her site during Austin and she panicked and emailed Google, "pouring her heart out." Google assured her that it's simply algo fluctuations, the site is perfectly acceptable to them, and offered her free AdWords coupons to mitigate the sting a little.

[loanuniverse]

Dave: Well, there is no way that my site could be identified as a link farm. In fact, the only html link out of my front page that does not go inside the site is to the charity. I just got upset at the comments that this other webmaster said. He stated that I was selling Pagerank, which could not be furthest from the truth since the money goes to the charity and all I wanted was to recognize donors.

Anyway, I guess people get above and beyond cautious when it comes to this matter. I am just dissapointed that my fundraising will suffer.

[Chicken Juggler]

There are a lot of people around here and other places that consider themselves "Expert at SEO". That group as actualy very small. There are a lot of people that are just getting into this and are quite cocky about some things. When i first started out I said some pretty stupid things to people. It's funny how people love to spout off warnings and advice when they really don't know much. By default somebody sending you SEO advice randomly like that is not an expert. You did the right thing to come here and ask. I agree with the above posts. That is not a link farm.