Selling Links what the worst that can happen
Well the answer is a hand ban I guess, but what if you have bigger balls than the guy that’s going to press the ban button, in Google Spam Team that’s Matt and in Fairness I would not like to test him, ( He ban’s and puts my sites under penalty just for the record, buying not selling links that is )..
So lets look at some history Sept 2005 on Matt’s blog http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/text-links-and-pagerank/ Matt talked about dailycal.org and how they broke Googles rules, but did the DailyCal do anything to fix the issue. Here is was Matt said at the time
When the Berkeley college newspaper has six online gambling links (three casinos, two for poker, and one bingo) on its front page, it’s harder for search engines to know which links can be trusted
– never a truer word spoken, so what’s happens next does the DailyCal take a beating in the serps : 2 years later they are still #1 for Student Newspaper California but Matt did say :
A natural question is: what is Google’s current approach to link buying? Of course our link-weighting algorithms are the first line of defense, but it’s difficult to catch every problem case in adversarial information retrieval, so we also look for problems and leaks in different semi-automatic ways. Reputable sites that sell links won’t have their search engine rankings or PageRank penalizedâ€"a search for [daily cal] would still return dailycal.org. However, link-selling sites can lose their ability to give reputation (e.g. PageRank and anchortext).
Now I guess that’s what happened the DailyCal gets to keep it’s rankings and Pagerank it just dosen’t pass any juice to your site, So is the DailyCal committing Link Fraud and is Google unwittingly helping them by showing that they still have Pagerank ?
I mean they even link to EBay, NASA, Dell and the Wikipedia in the Site Sponsors, I guess that so the sales people can say “hey, didn’t hurt Dell did it”, So should google Ban the Dailycal or remove the Toolbar Pagerank at least ?
DaveN
10 Comments
Kris from Florida
Dave,
I think as we speak the visual toolbar is already not reflecting real values, it is the easiest move Google can do to confuse the link buying market, to pull the plug on displaying Pagerank .
Richard Hearne
Easiest move to diffuse the link buying issue perhaps, but not without a large amount of fallout. I can just hear all the calls now – ‘what happened to my Pagerank?’.
@DaveN – so you’ve been penalised for buying links then? How did he figure that out? (I know it’s you, but seriously?) Does this open the door for me to buy links for my competitors who are not ‘reputable’ in Google’s eyes? And what happens if ‘reputable’ sites get caught buying links?
One last question – how about installing the subscribe to comments plugin
Phantombookman
The whole Google linking and PR business is totally out of hand now.
You cannot create a comodity, give it value, then tell people you cannot trade in it if you have it.
The whole paranoia over this issue means many sites who are just going about their business, not spamming, not buying links etc end up having the odd few links they have javascripted or nofollowed, that or Google greybars their own navigation pages etc which means your own internal PR is not spread as it would be.
Result: your pages go supplemental – why ? Not enough pagerank !
Go figure
Joe (yosef) Martin
It’s an issue since Google’s goal, on one hand, is showing most relevant results but on the other had band spam. So what happened when a major site violates the rules? If you remember the BMW case, Google did bend BMW Germany for few days. I think, if all equal today the algorithm putts the weight of the site popularity versus the violation. After all selling links is not black hat.
DaveN
@Richard “so you’ve been penalised for buying links then? How did he figure that out? ” not for this site a client site he paid someone to get High Pr links, we got burnt big style… How did i know it was the Backlinks, because other than them it was clean.
DaveN
Rodjer - http://www.hypotheek-weetjes.nl
Damn this is a hard issue. If google go on like this, they will be a sort of “internet cops” and i know for sure, that they dont want that to happen. So my conclusions, they’d better stop these actions before they will ruine thereselfs.
My 2 cents
Blogs for Money - http://blogsformoney.com/
Interesting article. It makes sense not to remove them though – Google want to serve up the most relevant pages to their users. Pushing the best sites to the bottom because they haid paid links on them isn’t going to wash with the visitors – they don’t care about the links, they wanted content on that page. Google will have to be careful with how they ban people if they still want to maintain useful results.
CPA Affiliates - http://www.cpa-affiliates.com
The thing is even when you pay for links the webmaster has to approve it. I mean google lets you buy your way into their paid search engine results… with buying links on sites you are just buying placement into their natural rankings :).
Kev
The paid link debate is not one that google can win.
While they are not good at recognising paid links we buy them for ourselves to get us up the rankings.
When they are we buy them for our competitors to get them banned.
Molar - http://www.isa-media.de/blog/
hmmm… anybody know the price that google payed for the link at adobe.com?
by the way its a footer link!
Will adobe be punished with pagerank downgrades???