One of the more entertaining aspects of the entire paid links debate is Google is pretty quick to dole out the punishment, even though in many cases they haven’t taken the time to get their own house in order. We’ve discussed the links to Golfballs.com on the Google checkout blog multiple times. At this point it pretty obvious Google has done some sort of manual adjustment as the page clearly isn’t passing any link juice. Why Google has chosen this route instead of any of the methods outlined in their webmaster guidelines remains something of a mystery. We’ve also been assured that none of the links on these Google mini pages are influencing the algo or ranking in any way. Again curiously they’ve chosen not to implement any of the solutions spelled out in the webmaster guidelines. Here’s a new one I stumbled across last week a list of Google Partners who have implemented Google Checkout all sitting on a nice PR8 page with straight links. I’m sure someone from Google will be along shortly to tell us these links have been taken care of algorithmically and are not passing any juice or influencing the rankings in any way. Fine I’ll believe them. However what I’d really like to know is why isn’t Google following their own recommendations and implementation suggestions for nofollows, redirects, and robots.txt. Should all 5000+ of my readers file spam reports that Google is selling text links? Could we reasonably expect that page to be banned from the index (please oh please that would so make my day). How can Google the company who is attempting to dictate how the web should structured expect everyone else to comply with their guidelines when they are doing miserable job of following those same guidelines themselves? If that isn’t the pot calling the kettle black I don’t know what is …Comments

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Search optimization pros bade farewell to paid links and other techniques after Google made certain changes through the past year.While the demise of the paid link as a factor in PageRank hammered plenty of webmasters, there were other changes Google made that loomed in SEO over the course of the year.SEO Roundtable picked up on a summary of these changes. Brett Borders at Copy Brighter summarized these in a blog post.In the list, which included reciprocal and directory linking, the supplemental index, sponsored blog posts, subdomains, and the end of ten blue links per search result page due to universal search, Borders noted the paid links change, and how it used to be:Not so long ago, it was possible to pick up the phone and call a major text link broker with open inventory and buy your way to good rankings. Now sites that openly sell links are coming under heavy fire. Top-secret brokers and hand-picked, carefully negotiated and camouflaged buys are the paid way in 2008.Famed Googler Matt Cutts has stated publicly that Google can pick out disguised paid links. That leaves webmasters in search of a fast track to the top of the SERPs in a quandary. If they go the hush-hush buying route, will their efforts go for naught once Google decides those links may not be up to its quality standards, and penalizes the site? 

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Michael Gray doesn’t know who I am, I don’t expect him to. We sat next to each other one day at lunch during Pubcon, he is a polite, engaging guy, with obviously tons of knowledge in SEO/SEM field. I enjoyed Michael’s many interviews on Local search, and learned much from his posts. He has earned a great deal of respect for his knowledge in this industry, no bones about it. (And here comes the but). But in his latest rant concerning Google and paid links, which was in response to Matt Cutts’ blog post about paid links, I think Michael’s perspective of the situation is just a bit too simplified. Now, I am not what anyone should consider a SEO, I am more of a SEO theorist at best. I have been learning SEO to selfishly help our businesses grow online, so I analyze SEO related, and most business related situations through my experience as a small business owner and based on basic economic principles. These lenses are the only ones I feel comfortable using when analyzing interesting business issues, just so we have established my perspective. Michael Gray has a problem, as do many, with the apparent hypocrisy within Google. On one hand Google asks us to not buy or sell links, and to report sites which do one or both. Google tells us this will allow them to adjust a site’s rank, and relevance calculations accordingly, which needs to be done because links currently influence a site’s rank. So, in a paid linkless world, Google, in theory, would only be serving up the most relevant sites for each of our search queries. This of course is a preposterous dream, but we will leave this a discussion on another post, it still remains the stated purpose of Google’s actions. Now to the other hand, while Google publicly denounces and punishes those dealing in paid links, they turn around and make piles of cash selling links for placement on their SERPS, as well as on other sites participating in their ad delivery system. On the surface there is definitely some cause for concern, and the appearance of impropriety is nothing short of glaring. It is this apparent conflict of interest which has Michael Gray and SEO minions riled up. “Why can Google sell links on their site, but we can’t sell them on our site?”, is their united cry. It is a good question, it is a fair question, and one I don’t think Google has quite answered completely or eloquently enough, which possibly increases the ire even more. So from a simpleton’s business perspective, let me provide Google with a little defense fodder to this whole selling links dealio. I do not come at this as a dyed-in-the-wool Google Kool-Aid drinker, although I do use them as my primary search engine. Nor do I do this because Matt Cutts was genuinely cool to Michael Jensen and myself as we left PubCon one night. (Matt: we sincerely hope you are using and enjoying the SoloSEO swag item in good listening health.) We all enjoyed a few minutes crossing a busy street together, which in Vegas is a bonding moment, as is any other near-death experience. The simple reason Google is trying to manage the paid link situation in this heavy-handed manner, is they are protecting their core business, that’s it… That’s the answer, nothing more to see here, move along. Now Gray suggests in his post that Google had in fact created the paid link mess, but this isn’t totally correct. Links have always been a good measure of a site’s popularity, many of us will remember all the early sites, which proudly displayed a “Links” page, I used those “referral” pages all the time. Links to companies, from companies I already trusted, made a difference to me, as I am sure they did to many. Even today, links out from trusted sites are a good referral, and lend credibility to that site. So not including the incoming links as a measure of a site’s quality would be a huge mistake for any search engine. Links must to be measured by all serious search engines attempting to deliver relevant results. And because links are beneficial to our site in terms of traffic and sales, some are willing to pay for them, that is why paid links abounds. So Google didn’t create the paid link mess, but by profiting the most through the selling of links, they definitely have the appearance of being holier than thou in their current stance. Perhaps Google and their billions don’t particularly care what we think, but I don’t think that is the base motivation behind their actions. There is one area in this paid search mess which does concern me a bit… Google’s position on why buying links from them is ok, is based on the fact that when we buy from them, they know who we are, and they know not to pass page rank from those links, in order to keep their rankings systems pure. Here is the tricky part, if Google is squeaky clean, then the relevance and popularity of any paying client’s site should not be improved or effected, even though they are paying clients. We can only hope Google is ethical, and this is how it is handled, otherwise Google is no better than Tyco, WorldComm and Enron. Unfortunately, I know of some who now buy ads with Google, not only because they hope to get more traffic through SERPs, but also because they believe it potentially improves their organic positioning on the SERPs. So, in an odd way, Google actually profits from the appearance of a possible impropriety, most likely based on the current corporate climate, in which many of us just assume big businesses are greedy, lying, cheating, crooks. Pretty sad. Ultimately we may never know if there is a benefit to a site’s ranking through advertising with Google, this is a part of Google’s “secret sauce” and protected as proprietary. So unless someone from the Google inside commits corporate hara-kiri, and tells the world how it all works, we will never know. So, in a perfect search world, paid links to Google would not have an effect on a site’s organic position within Google’s SERP, this practice, in principle, would be going against their core business model of providing the most relevant, naturally occurring search results for every search query. For me personally, I understand why Google sells advertising… Because they can, and because it makes them loads of the green. We all would do the same if we could, in this regard the Google haters are being a bit ingenuous. I also understand why Google tries to manage the paid links conundrum, in a sense, to protect and improve their ability to provide their clients with the best search experience possible. We can only hope Google is being responsible in keeping the two practices mutually exclusive, and not influencing results based on their paying client list. It is also easy to understand why many are suspect of Google, there have been so many instances of corporate greed in the past, that many are cynical, rightly so. But not to worry, history has shown us again and again that business is the survival of the fittest. And the fittest companies are the ones that do things ethically and honestly for the long term. Eventually the law, or competition puts the fakers/takers in jail, or out of business. It has always been that way, it doesn’t matter the market, it doesn’t matter the product or service, and it doesn’t matter the company, eventually time runs out. We will know at some point in the future if Google is doing what they claim to be doing, or if they are truly are as slimy as some believe them to be. In the meantime, while Google carries their big stick, we might want to think twice before buying links, not everyone at Google is as pleasant as we found Matt to be.

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Paid links and PR drops were a hot topic at Pubcon Las Vegas last week. We talked to Matt Cutts about it in a video interview, and he explained it quite rationally. What's interesting to me though is the reaction we see from our readers. Some are vehemently opposed to what they consider Google strong arm tactics and then there are those of you who think Google is performing a service to the internet community by cracking down on paid links. What Do You Think About Paid Links? As such, I wanted to post some of the more interesting comments we've received to the issue so far and basically ask for some more feedback from WebProNews readers on the subject. Are paid links a necessary evil? Are they necessary at all? Is Google taking a proper stance when they say 'NO', or should they maybe try to find some middle ground? Keep in mind, Google has created the 'link economy' with it's algorithmic emphasis on links=quality... so is Google really serving the 'greater good' or just looking out for number one here? » Natural Products Says: Great interview. Seems like big brother is putting the hammer down on paid links. Thanks for the video. » Submitted by Bill Inman Google decided to become a dictator a long time ago. Trying to control every aspect of our web sites, where we now spend more time worrying about what Google is going to do with our web site, than we do trying to design a site that will best serve the needs of our potential customers. Google created the whole issue of "links" which has resulted in all the silly link pages everyone created, and now thew paid links. My advice to Google is to get out of the role, and the opinion, that the world should revolve around them, and controling everything about our web sites. Google is a good idea gone mad! » Submitted by Dave Robinson I think Google's stance on the whole link debate is fair and honest. The reason for linking being seen as a measure of a sites importance has it's roots in academia where peer reviewed papers would reference other works of note. Google wasn't playing some game, it created a system that rewarded hard work. Now this has been circumvented it's only right that Google tries to address this. IMHO » Submitted by SEO book Uk There us a way to get even with google just pull adsense from your sites if 1 Million website pulled adsense for just a day google would notice a drop in revenue and will think twice before make webmaster angry again » Submitted by David Jenkins I'm all for the demise of paid links having spent over seven years building an information site that has never paid for a link and never will. I am delighted that Google is taking this stance and would be glad to see "content is God" dominating the search results again. » Submitted by Jim In reference to Google's insistence that they are a private company and can do what ever they want. Les we forget, the power of Google is granted by the web users and masters. Currently web masters are the biggest users of the Google browser. It is web masters pages posting Google adds, and Google searches that built Google's popularity. The foundation of Google rest with the web master, combined we propelled Google to the top, and combined we can kick the feet out from under it. Change you adds to Yahoo, Change your search engines. In short, stop using Google, and Google shall fall. » Submitted by Nicole on Tue, 12/11/2007 - 14:53. As a small business web-site owner, AND as an in-house SEO writer for a large company, I frankly am happy that Google is downgrading paid-link sites that pass on link juice. When wearing my small biz hat, I can't afford to buy paid links and it gives bigger companies an advantage I can't yet afford. I think Google is indeed living up to their 'do no evil' company motto by doing this. » Submitted by Kevin Hillman People that support Google in any way just further the scam. Every link on any Google site is there because Google was paid to place the link there. They just like to make every site conform to their heavy handed rules. They want to own the entire internet and will crush any website they don't agree with. Do you agree or disagree with the above comments? Are paid links just part of business, or are they something evil when they influence search results? Add your thoughts here... Watch the video, and read the article where our readers above commented.   

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The wild debate about Google's increasingly hardline stance against paid links looks like Wimbledon, with Matt Cutts taking on Rich Skrenta, while Danny Sullivan volleys against Michael Gray. Cutts, Sullivan Weigh In On Paid Links Internet Drama, in the form of the ongoing paid links debate, received a couple of new entries to fan the flames. Webmasters see paid links as a way to boost their search engine presence against the competition. Google perceives paid links as a mechanism that devalues their core organic search results. Rich Skrenta posted his stream-of-consciousness thoughts about the paid link debate. He said "PageRank wrecked the web," a reference to part of Google's model of weighting search results based on inbound links. "Links used to be for human navigation," said Skrenta. "Google made them count for money and they're ruined now. Nofollow isn't going to put it back the way it was." Cutts answered from the comments, defending Google's position: I truly believe any successful system (be it eBay, Amazon, Usenet, Wikipedia, DMOZ, or government spending) will attract people who try to optimize for that system or even game it. When Google came onto the scene with its new way of ranking search results in 1999/2000, it was inevitable that people would try to optimize for Google and link-based reputation. Tools like rel=nofollow give site owners a method to decide whether to flow PageRank at a link-level of granularity. Over on Graywolf's blog, Gray called Google crybabies over the paid links issue. "The problem is you figured a way to make money off of a link based analysis, and now you?re upset and ridding the waaaaaaaaambulance when other people move in on your cash cow," said Gray. "You feel like you have some god given right to be the only one who makes money off of it." Sullivan answered back in the comments: If we?re talking crybabies, then include the website owners that have tapped into the PageRank economy and now are upset with the Federal Reserve Of Google has decided to cut interest rates. Hey, newsflash - Google?s an independent company that at least in the United States has a court-backed decision that says the First Amendment gives it a constitutionally protected right to do whatever the hell it wants with the PageRank meter. So you built your business around selling ads linked to PageRank, and now you?re upset when Google pulls the plug? Suck it up - the writing?s been on the wall that this WILL happen (not could) since 2003, and all Google has really done is finally made it more visible that many sites selling PageRank weren?t actually passing along credit at all. The point about Google being an independent company summarizes the whole paid link issue, though we understand it will continue to be a sore spot for many. It's Google's game, and they can change the rules. Betting that they would continue to favor outsiders as much as Google favors itself looks like it was a poor wager. follow me on Twitter

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The dominant search engine, Google, doesn't have a problem with nofollowed paid links, but few webmasters want to pay for something that brings minimal value to their sites. PubCon: Treading Lightly On Link Buying WebProNews is at PubCon 2007 in Las Vegas, bringing you the latest in web marketing. John Lessnau noted several points about purchasing links during the Link Buying session. Webmasters do it for various reasons, but the main idea is to improve one's search engine ranking and traffic. Using paid links to do so has become much more difficult through 2007, as Google and other search engines frown upon the practice. Google has been notably cracking down on sites that buy links, but do not provide a useful experience for the visitor. Lessnau cited reasons why sites buy links in content. They are naturally relevant, and help search engines understand what a site is about. (The increasingly strident stance Google has taken this year says they understand sites just fine without paid links, so keep that in mind too. - David) Aaron Wall detailed some alternatives to link buying. Content syndication on other sites builds authority, sends traffic, and helps PageRank flow. Webmasters can buy competing websites in their niche as another option. But the effort that will help keep a site from the dreaded PR 0 reduction comes from encouraging organic links. There is no shortcut to doing this. A regular editorial voice, community participation, and a quality site design can lead to picking up good links. And of course, there is also Wall's recommendation to buy AdWords ads for linkbait articles, which means buying a basket of related keywords. There are ways to buy links, according to Rand Fishkin, that he thinks search engines can't catch. Direct one-to-one purchases, and business relationships where links are a secondary part of the services, have worked for him. Anyone buying links should heed Jim Boykin, who told attendees to stay under the radar and "don't piss off Google." WebProNews managing editor Mike McDonald contributed to this report. follow me on Twitter

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Let the bargaining begin. It's a natural stage of mourning. As Google shuffles loose the paid links from its algorithms, SEOs are cycling past their initial denial, their outrage, and have begun negotiating. Stay tuned; depression and acceptance are likely to follow. The Paid Link Stages Of Grief On his blog this morning, SEOMoz.org's Rand Fishkin gave a sneak peak at the presentation he has intended for PubCon in Las Vegas. It's topic: A solution to the paid links debate. Fishkin introduces (I'm using a looser sense of this verb, which I'll get to later) his solution/compromise as "Sponsored Editorials." If this strikes you immediately as similar to pay-per-post, you might be right, but Fishkin has put some idealistic stipulations on an admittedly imperfect model without actually outlining how it differs. Instead of selling a link, Fishkin suggests selling reviews with links in them. In essence, webmasters are paying for the review, not the link. The reviewer is paid whether or not he or she posts something positive. The link is designated "nofollow" if the reviewer is not offering an endorsement, or the nofollow attribute is removed is the reviewer does offer endorsement. "The marketplace has to exist," he writes, "and search engine have to fight against what they perceive to be manipulative, non-editorial votes. But, what if there was a solution that could make both sides happy? A place where money changed hands between parties, but editorial decisions still came into play?" Commentators are quick to point out that while it as at least a step in some direction, it seems only a matter of time (and perhaps very quickly) before this system is also gamed, before money under the table is exchanged for the removal of nofollow tags, before reviewers run unscrupulous review systems. One suggests a more complicated system of credibility ranking, to help control for that. Or the kind of credibility system like the one Google's been working on for years. Fishkin's proposal comes with unfortunate timing. Over the weekend, Google's Matt Cutts, in a lengthy post, intimated that paid reviews (paid posts) are also on the webspam team's radar. Cutts reiterates Google's commitment to assuring quality information and utilizes the sobering example of brain tumor treatment research. A person researching such a horrifying diagnosis would most likely be aghast, or at least potentially ill-served (if you'll forgive the pun) if sponsored reviews of medical treatments like radiosurgery influenced the patient's research results. Especially if they are reviews like the ones Cutts exhibits where reviewers have bad spelling or demonstrative lack of knowledge about that which they are reviewing. "For this very important (potentially even life-or-death) medical topic," writes Cutts, "we saw paid reviewers admit that they knew nothing about a treatment before getting paid to post about it, or who didn’t research the subject enough to know that a treatment was decades old instead of brand-new. We saw people writing about brain tumors who didn’t even spell 'tumor' correctly, and we saw people who got the name of the sponsor wrong." In short, things aren't looking good for the paid post. At least, where one is openly or obviously paid. A cynical contributor to Aaron Wall's SEObook, though, makes a fair point that Cutts' example (that it was fear-based notwithstanding) denies the reality of medical research and the big money behind it. Wall questions whether paid posts are worse than sponsored research, and calls on "RFK" to drive it home: "The irony is that most/all of the articles that he would prefer to see on the Google SERPS are researched, assembled and ghost written by pharma companies. Having worked with a number of clients in the medical field it's become more and more apparent that the 'studies' published by well-known academics are most often based on research by the drug companies, scripted by a hired copywriter and given to the academic to sign off and publish under their byline." Surely, and one is also reminded of recent accusations that certain FDA commissioners rejected experimental cancer drug Provenge because of their investments in chemotherapy, a competing treatment. Though Wall's post switches direction and delves into the more esoteric concept of "the googlization of reality," the point that no industry or topic is without its vested interests and stakeholders rings a resonant (and perhaps more deeply frightening) bell. For even the purity of Wikipedia, which Google loves to champion, is not without its soiled fringes – what with secret mailing lists and editor witch hunts gumming up the gears from time to time (watch out for "free range sarcasm"). On to the next stage of grieving then, which is depression for SEOs now looking to bargain with Google about (overtly) paid anything – and that general malaise that comes with the cracking of an ideal that anything, even within Google's gleaming search rankings, is pure. And acceptance? Well, if it ever comes, it will be accepting that our porcelain ideals are chipped in practice, are borrowed eventually from the realization that the Behaviorists were right (nothing is without prior motivation), and are never without a dark mirror of an ideal to contradict. But that's no reason not to have them, now is it?

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Google continues to beat the drum about passing PageRank through paid links as Matt Cutts weighed in on the topic with another request that webmasters use the 'nofollow' attribute for them. Paid Links Still Evil To Google Though plenty of places in the Northern Hemisphere shiver in chilly temperatures, webmasters will continue radiating heat after the latest double-barreled barrage from Google's loquacious engineer. Paid links have a long history of annoying Google due to the way they can affect organic rankings. This has been the year of living dangerously for webmasters who engage in pushing PageRank through paid links. Google's crackdown on sites using these links without a 'nofollow' tacked onto them means more websites will see the dreaded reduction in their PageRank as punishment. Matt wrote about this at the Google Webmaster Central blog and his personal site. A couple of essential points he made will stand out for webmasters: Q: Is Google trying to tell webmasters how to run their own site? A: No. We're giving advice to webmasters who want to do well in Google. As I said in this video from my keynote discussion in June 2007, webmasters are welcome to make their sites however they like, but Google in turn reserves the right to protect the quality and relevance of our index. To the best of our knowledge, all the major search engines have adopted similar positions. Q: Is Google trying to crack down on other forms of advertisements used to drive traffic? A: No, not at all. Our webmaster guidelines clearly state that you can use links as means to get targeted traffic. In fact, in the presentation I did in August 2007, I specifically called out several examples of non-Google advertising that are completely within our guidelines. We just want disclosure to search engines of paid links so that the paid links won't affect search engines. Several webmaster comments posted to the Webmaster Central blog took issue with the paid links stance, with some complaining of being penalized without cause. One commenter named Jason said one blog he has received the PR 0 hit, and has never bought or sold a link. "What about sites that received the penalty by mistake?" he asked. "I'm hesitant to submit a re-inclusion request because it requires admission of wrongdoing. Is there any way of asking for a review that doesn't require falsely stating that we've gone against the webmaster guidelines?" In response, Matt suggested the drop could have been a result of canonicalization issues, and that PageRank does tend to fluctuate. As far as the language of the reinclusion request to which Jason objected, Matt had this to say: I don't want to force people to claim that they've violated our guidelines in doing a reconsideration request. I believe that we've already softened our language on that form once and that we added the option to say "something happened on this domain before I got to it." But your feedback is something that I've heard before, and I'll try to have someone at Google look at what we can do to remove that concern. If you have suggestions for language or the best way to do it, I'm open to whatever you want to propose. Google isn't worried about whether someone's site gets noticed in the search results or not. The other major search engines have similar views. To them, paid links skew what searchers see, and not always to the searcher's benefit. Matt's example of this on his blog shows how a query for the very serious topic of cancer-fighting radiosurgery brings up useless and misleading results when paid links pass PageRank. "If you stumbled across these entries on the web, you might not know whether someone got paid for writing these posts. In the same way that a regular surfer would want disclosure to know if a post were paid, all the major search engines also want to make sure that paid posts are adequately disclosed to search engines as well," Matt said. Use paid links without identifying them, and Google will penalize the site. It's a cause and effect that enrages webmasters who want to rate well in the world's dominant search engine. Many are going to feel this is part of a ploy to drive them to buy ads on Google to get noticed. That is a side effect of Google's attack on less than useful content. One can see why webmasters will feel this way. Google is a business, not a public utility, even if it seems otherwise to Internet users. They make the rules for their SERPs, as the other engines do, and playing on their site means following them, or going to the bottom of the list. follow me on Twitter

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 Google has officially said that buying and selling links that pass PageRank is a violation of the company's Webmaster Guidelines, and can result in a drop in search rankings. Google's update reads as follows: [S]ome SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google's webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results. 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. This can be done in several ways, such as:     ·    Adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to the <a> tag     ·    Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file The result is that many SEOs will no doubt be changing their strategies, and early indicators say their not happy about it. David Wallace, who seems to be one of the first on the scene to the update, is one of them: "[T]he sites that we sell advertising on draw a lot of traffic in specific niches and as a result, our advertisers want to attract some of that traffic. If it helps their sites to rank better, that is an indirect effect and is actually the fault of Google's own algorithm. Despite that fact, I am now violating their guidelines if I do not add a "nofollow" attribute tag to the links or use some kind of redirection so that the link is not a clean html link. I'm sorry but that is pure bull!@#$ and further evidence that Google has turned into a bully, trying to dictate how web site owners should run their sites." SearchEngineGuide's Jennifer Laycock is also disturbed by Google's penalizing of passive, perhaps ignorant, acts: "I continue to be frustrated at the idea that Google is now actively penalizing sites for NOT doing something. In the past, most of Google's penalties have been leveled at sites who were actively trying to game the engines by using things like hidden text or cloaking. With their new stance on paid links, many site owners who buy and sell advertising without giving a thought to the impact it could have on their search rankings are now at risk." Google set the SEO world on alert earlier this year when a large swath of online directories suddenly dropped off the face of Google's rankings. They were right to take it as a signal about paid links.

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Because Google has neglected to make certain links from its site nofollow, webmasters are wondering how, exactly, they differ from paid links.  All you have to do to get a link from Google's PageRank 7 Mini Enterprise Search Appliance page is buy the product, which runs just shy of $2,000. Buy a Mini and Google adds a link to your site along with your Google Mini "success story." Would you call that a laundered link? Search Engine Roundtable brought it to our attention, but we somehow missed Andy Beal dropping the dime back in June: "While many of these success stories are for established and recognizable businesses who sincerely appreciate the advanced search capabilities the Mini provides, others are undoubtedly as pleased with their new link as their new Google Mini." Google's webspam team has been pretty vigilant this year about penalizing sites that buy or sell PageRank-passing links. And while this isn't exactly a direct purchase, it is a bit ironic.

google mini links link quot pagerank success search story exactly vigilant laundering ngoogle engine team paid miss pleas webspam provides

The recent slap a handful of directories experienced was unaccompanied by an explanation from Google, though the general consensus (maybe) was that Google's webspam team was sending a message. Weeks later, WebProNews has wrangled a response from Google's Webmaster Central team – sort of. Seems Matt Cutts and company are in high demand, hence the delayed response. Responding to request for comment as to why the directories in question had vanished from the search results and whether Google was penalizing paid link directories especially, a Webmaster Central source replies: There's no "outright penalty" for being a directory, but we do value, as I'm sure you've heard, "unique, compelling content." Directories can run into the problem of not containing original information. Should the webmaster believe their site has fallen in search results, there's no reason they can't add more "unique, compelling content" to help their site rise. So there you have it, though it's still not an answer (and we really wouldn't expect one) as to whether the directories affected most were the result of the paid links reporting form. But we can assume from that answer that Google is treating link directories much the same way it treats splogs and spammy websites. As long as the directory has some value to the end user (i.e., the content is king philosophy), then there shouldn't be any beef. Further, as is true with any site, if penalized by Google (and if Google search results are a major goal), directory owners can add content and resubmit for indexing.

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The paid link debate has a new topic to chew on, namely the official word and demonstrated effect of Google penalizing sites that sell links. Link Selling Equals Google Juice Squeeze From Google's mouth to Danny Sullivan's ears came the word on selling links. He's followed the issue, using the Stanford Daily student newspaper website as an example. Stanford Daily had enjoyed a PageRank of 9, and a $350 per month revenue stream per text link. That PR 9 has dwindled from its position in April, said Danny: Last week, I noticed the Stanford Daily had dropped from when I wrote the above in April to PR7 today. That's a huge drop that has no apparent reason to happen. Some others were also reporting PageRank drops. So I pinged Google, and they confirmed that PageRank scores are being lowered for some sites that sell links. 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. Humorously enough, Danny discovered an instance where Google doesn't let link selling get in the way of its multi-billion dollar business. On his site, Google advertising for a "PR 6 .Edu Backlink" appeared within a Search Engine Land story.

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It's been a couple of weeks since it became apparent that Google was penalizing link directories – at least a few of them – knocking them out of the SERPs even for their own business names. There's still no official word from Google on this, but there is plenty speculation that it wasn't algorithmic. Finking On Paid Linking? The reason that speculation has arisen is that though there was a seeming spate of directories hit, the number of them – up to 60 or so that we know of – is relatively small compared to the number of directories out there, hundreds or thousands passing on PageRank. One theory suggests that people are using Google's controversial paid links report form, implemented last spring to a furious response. However, shortly after Matt Cutts' invitation to report instances of paid links, Cutts clarified that he and Google's webspam team weren't interested in reports on directories, only instances similar to what he cited on his blog. Nevertheless, Cutts followed up that question with some rules of thumb for evaluating a directory's value: - 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. Webmaster Takeaways Paid link reports are not    automatic Mind your link neighborhoods Don't sell links that pass    PageRank Google doesn't like being    gamed Penalized directories may be    a message» Give our readers your take That may or may not be a lot to consider, and given that a select few directories have been affected, it may be a cue that Google is considering it more than before. It may be just a strong message being sent, a warning to clean things up. Rand Fishkin ups the considerations with a lengthy post at SEOMoz entitled "What Makes a Good Web Directory, and Why Google Penalized Dozens of Bad Ones." The most interesting suggestion is that Google is manually taking down directories that violate its guidelines, and not necessarily with a strategy that involves spam reports, but rather by taking what might be obvious cues: Banner Ads [for paid links] from Your Directory on SEO Sites - It's like waving a flag with a voice-activated, wind powered speaker that yells "ban me! ban me!" Sure, you might get clicks and money and submissions, but you've gotta know that search quality team members read SEO blogs, too - so if you do this, make sure your directory is ready to be manually reviewed by search engineers. Marketing to Webmasters - If your forum signature at Digitalpoint (sorry to stereotype, but it's just so true) contains links to three directories you own, you're probably in possession of three obviously manipulative directories. I'm sure there's a couple exceptions, but if I were Matt Cutts, I'd just tell one of my quality control guys to go spend a few days trawling DP for directory domains. Speaking of DigitalPoint, some there seem to agree that they're being targeted, and are smelling "rats." One such forum member says: I have been in touch with a lot of directory owners, free and paid. Also blog network owners and many have lost PR and SERPs ranking. I think it is simply from Googles new 'Report Paid Listings' For those who report paid listings, DP is a gold mine for these rats. It's important to note also that Cutts says the reports, if used, are not fed automatically into the webspam algorithm, but are only starting points for review, suggesting a report is not automatic guilt. Until Google speaks up though, we may not know whether people are finking on paid linking, or if Google just sent the directory world a message via some notorious suspects, but webmasters will be free to speculate until they do.   

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Will advertising kill Twitter? Probably not, but it might kill the popularity of the Twitterers tweeting the ads if some consideration isn't put into it. The concept is nothing new. Don't like the ads you are getting in an email subscription? You'll probably unsubscribe. Don't like paid posts on a blog you read? You'll probably stop reading. I don't see why the same principal wouldn't apply to Twitter. Word is that popular blogger Perez Hilton is making big-money deals to do some paid tweeting. Some will be quick to point out that this kind of behavior will ruin Twitter, but really, it will just piss off Perez Hilton's followers at worst. If it pisses them off enough, they'll just stop following him. At best, he is selective with his sponsored tweets and does not alienate his audience, and makes some nice bank while he's entertaining his fans (not that he isn't already doing that). Here's some stats about Hilton's blog audience from his own advertising page: Perez Hilton averages 250 million impressions and 10.5 million unique readers per month.     * 88% female     * 9% age 18-20     * 70% age 21-34     * 14% age 35-45     * 90% have attended college     * 60% earn $60,000 or greater (HHI) On Twitter, he has 1,008,960 (at the time of writing)followers. And look at what Facebook and Twitter have done for his traffic. It's no wonder sponsored tweets from him would be attractive to advertisers. Of course there are others out there doing this already. Heard of PayPerPost? Izea, the company behind that offers services where advertisers can pay for sponsored tweets, complete with unique tracking URLs and everything. Marketers pay for Twitter advertising campaigns on a Cost Per Click (CPC) basis. Izea says its sponsored tweets are all marked with the hashtag #spon. This can lead to scenarios like this where many people are retweeting sponsored tweets: Could this annoy followers? Sure. You're taking your following into your own hands when you go the sponsored tweet route. I don't think this will ruin Twitter for the followers as much as it could for the ones tweeting the sponsored links if they are not considerate with their sponsored tweets. It's a reputation issue. Do you want to be known as the guy pushing ads on people all the time? Quality and audience factor in as well. "Sponsored" often comes with a negative connotation attached to it, but it isn't always a negative, even from the reader's point of view. If you are tweeting a sponsored link for a something your followers might actually be into, I don't see why they would mind. Choose your tweets carefully. This is a good rule to live by sponsored tweets or no sponsored tweets. And if they're sponsored, you better mark them as such, or you are bound to alienate people. I'm not sure where the FTC stands on paid tweeting, but that could be a whole other set of problems.

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Jaws dropped last week upon the news Google penalized its own Japanese site in Google search results after discovering Google Japan participated in a pay-per-post blogging scheme. WebProNews Video caught up with Google’s anti-spam-team captain, Matt Cutts, who offers his apologies. “Certainly there were a lot of angry, upset, disappointed people within Google,” Cutts said about the situation, which led to Google Japan dropping from a PageRank 9 to a PageRank 5, the first time Google has ever had to penalize itself for violating its own terms of service. “Speaking for me personally, I was mortified. I was just very, very upset about it. To the extent I can personally apologize, I do apologize for the fact that this happened.” More WebProNews Videos  Google Japan hired a Japanese company called Cyberbuzz, who paid bloggers as much as $100 to write about a new search widget. This was a clear violation of Google’s rules, which Google has aggressively and publicly enforced over the past couple of years, much to many directory operators’ chagrins.  “We’re contacting all these bloggers and asking them remove the paid posts,” said Cutts. “We do think that paid posts and those sorts of things are bad because they lead to people writing about things they wouldn’t write about normally. And they can affect search engines in a negative way.”   Cutts pointed a finger directly at the marketing at Google Japan, which issued its own apology last week and, judging from the language, was unaware of Google’s stance against paid posts. Cutts reiterated Google’s stance on paid links and said the company’s position hadn’t changed. “We thought our position [was] clear, we [didn’t] need to reiterate, and I think part of the message is that maybe we do need to every so often just repeat [why we think paid posts are bad.]” “This is something where we should have done better,” he said.

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Go ahead and laugh, because it is funny. Google Japan’s probably too embarrassed to laugh, though, and someone somewhere is likely to resemble the spittle-drenched apologist from the movie Gung Ho. Google Japan, according to its apology, was apparently unaware of the company’s own terms of service. Paying a Japanese pay-per-post promotion company to pimp its new Hot Keywords blog widget caused the website to be busted down from PR 9 to PR 5. Many thanks goes out to blogger Akky Akimoto for discovery and English translation of what might described as a big, corporate party foul. When searching for (in Japanese) Google Hot Keywords Ranking  + “Blog Widget” + “CyberBuzz,” Akimoto found over 30 posts writing about the widget, all of them acknowledging being paid by CyberBuzz. Akimoto says CyberBuzz pays pretty handsomely for blog posts—up to $100 per post. Small ads were present at the bottom as well. The apology issued from Google Japan is priceless since it suggests Google Japan is just now learning of Google’s search guidelines: “Google Japan is running several promotional activities to let people know more about our products. "It turns out that using blogs on the part of the promotional activities violates Google’s search guidelines, so we have ended the promotion. We would like to apologize to the people concerned and to our users, and are making an effort to make our communications more transparent in order to prevent the recurrence of such an incident.” Hopefully no form of seppuku will be required and a simple gomenasai (or, if you’re a real Samurai: katajiganai on all fours with head bowed low) and Matt Cutts tweeted policy of treating all sites the same will suffice. Cutts tweets that he expects Google Japan’s new PR5 to remain as is for a while.    

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Quite a storm of debate has erupted over a new service called InLinks - essentially a paid text link service that allegedly makes it hard for Google (and other search engines) to detect them. And mouths of  Internet marketers begin to salivate. The debate has basically turned into Matt Cutts vs. the "Yeah, let's stick it to Google" crowd. .As far as I can tell, this started with TechCrunch reporting on InLinks, which prompted Matt Cutts to send them an email from which the following is a sample: Google has been very clear that selling such links that pass PageRank is a violation of our quality guidelines. Other search engines have said similar things. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has also given unambiguous guidance on this subject in the recent PDF at http://www.ftc.gov/os/2008/03/P064101tech.pdf where they said “Consumers who endorse and recommend products on their blogs or other sites for consideration should do so within the boundaries set forth in the FTC Guides Concerning Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising and the FTC’s guidance on word of mouth marketing,” as well as “To date, in response to this concern, the FTC has advised that search engines need to disclose clearly and conspicuously if the ranking or other presentation of search results is a function of paid placement, and, similarly, that consumers who are paid to engage in word-of-mouth marketing must disclose that fact to recipients of their messages.” After getting into some region-specific issues, he wraps up with "The reality is that accepting money to link to/promote/market for a product without disclosing that fact is a very high-risk behavior, in my opinion." I don't think anybody is surprised to see Cutts trying to defuse the situation before everybody gets too excited, but of course a topic like this isn't going to be left at that. Debate is sparking up around a variety of popular search blogs. You know Michael Gray for one is going to get involved in a discussion about this, but he made an interesting choice in how he decided to handle it: IMHO the key to buying links is using them over the short term 6-9 months, to jump start your rankings while you swing your PR machine into full gear, shaking hands  and kissing babies. Google has a top down preference for brands and the more you work normal PR and advertising tactics to reach that goal the better you are. Use viral marketing and linkbait to start securing links over time. As you start to acquire natural links, revisit your links buys and slowly start phasing them out (ultra competitive and non mainstream topics have different rules). My position on paid link advertisingwell known and at this point I don’t have anythingto add that hasn’t already been said . The most important thing I learned from Pubcon this year was stop wasting time on drama, so comments on this post will be closed. Where the debate really takes a turn on Google though, is when Jeremy Schoemaker points the camera back on the company's own practices. He writes: Every time paid links is brought up Matt Cutts brings up the FTC’s “suggestions” on bloggers disclosing things they have been compensated for. In no where in these “suggestions” does it talk about paid links. But even if it did they are just suggestions. They are not law and if Google was following the FTC’s suggestions I doubt Google Adsense/adlinks would be engaging in some of the most deceptive advertising methods I have ever seen on the internet. He also mentions Google's paying of $66 million to the allegedly non-profit Mozilla to be the default search engine for Firefox. From there a slew of comments went pouring in on Schoemaker's post, bashing Google's practices, calling the company names like "evil" and "hypocrite." Mentions are made of Google's own sponsored results being made less disclaimer-like by the lightening of the hue surrounding them. Eventually, Cutts weighs in here too amidst a sea of criticism. I'm not going to take the Michael Gray approach and stay out of the "drama". I'm leaving comments on, and I want to see what everybody thinks. Flamebait you say? Come on, you know you love to talk about this stuff. Ok....go!UPDATE:  I contacted Schoemaker and asked him to talk a little bit more about Google not being able to track the paid links with InLinks. He responded with:The key word I used was if done properly it would be impossible to detect.   Lets look at the current TLA and how easy it is to detect yet Google still can't get a grasp on it.Detecting the old text link ads was stupidly easy.For instance -  weblogtoolscollection.com  pr6 been selling TLA text links for a long time.  Never dinged in googlebut look at how easy it is to detect.footer imageand now look at the html source code:<!-- Begin Text-link Ad code --><center><ul style="border: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 0); margin: 0pt; padding: 0pt; overflow: hidden; width: 100%; border-spacing: 0px; background-color: rgb(240, 240, 240); list-style-type: none; list-style-image: none; list-style-position: outside;"><li style="margin: 0pt; padding: 0pt; width: 33%; float: left; clear: none; display: inline;"><span style="margin: 0pt; padding: 3px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); width: 100%; font-size: 12px; display: block;">  <a style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: 12px;" href="http://www.kars4kids.org/">Donate your car</a>  </span></li><li style="margin: 0pt; padding: 0pt; width: 33%; float: left; clear: none; display: inline;"><span style="margin: 0pt; padding: 3px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); width: 100%; font-size: 12px; display: block;">  <a style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: 12px;" href="http://www.cashnetusa.com">Payday Loans</a>  </span></li></ul></center><!-- End Text-Link Ad code -->How hard is that to detect?So of course Google thinks they can detect that... I mean a monkey can detect that.  Am I wrong?Now lets say the person didnt put the footer links like a idiot and didnt include the TLA HERE code in their html.Its still easy to detect cause you just look for the plugin within the wordpress plugin directory.  If its found the server returns a 200 code if not a 404.  If its a 200 google knows you have it installed. (emphasis added throughout response)So basically what Schoemaker is getting at is that if people "randomize the physical name of the plugin" and use some brains when writing the HTML, Google will not be able to detect it. Because as he says, they're "not even detecting the ones that are VERY EASY to detect." Thanks for the insight Jeremy.

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For every abolition an underground emerges. Google’s not exactly the law, and bootleggers during Prohibition didn’t exactly offer seminars about avoiding the revenuers. Todd Mailcoat, Rand Fishkin, John Lessnau, with six middle fingers between them, offer no such discretion and invited PubCon attendees under the table in a session titled Linkfluence: How to Buy Links With Maximum Juice and Minimum Risk. (Coverage of PubCon continues at WebProNews Videos.  Stay with WebProNews for continued coverage from the event this week.) About this time last year, Google issued steep ranking penalties to paid link directories, making very clear to webmasters wanting to benefit from the search engine that reaches two-thirds to three-fourths of the market that paid links without nofollow commands to drain them of their link juice were officially taboo. Most of the paid linking world either tried to hoof it out there without Google or reluctantly complied. But guys like Fishkin, Lessnau, Aaron Wall, you could call them outlaws, but really they are the leaders of the paid link underground that was a certain eventuality. Besides the juice, why would someone still be interested in buying links after all the Google strong-arming? “You get the anchor text want,” began Lessnau, “you get on the page you want, you get the location on the page you want.” People have reasons other than Google for not buying links he continued, like the upfront cost, the time, effort and salesmanship, the “hoping for a wave of natural links miracle.” Apparently, that’s just silly. Lessnau then provided an outline of “safe” paid links, which includes: A link that is relevant in the text of a webpage A link that is the only link on the page or one of very few on the site (this is important) Links with varied anchor text Links from inside pages Links that are long term. Lessnau recommends moderation. It’s always greed that gets people. Which type of site should one seek out? Lessnau recommends a site with good rankings and lots of natural links that is not a major link seller. He described a cautious process that involves searching for the keyword phrases he wants to rank for, finding websites and pages that would be a good fit, verifying the potential partner does not link to major link buyers, and then making a fair offer to the webmaster. Not only should a webmaster “know when to quit buying links,” she should also keep an eye on websites where links were bought to make sure the webmasters “stay clean.” Fishkin followed Lessnau’s presentation with less advice that sounds like the sort you’d hear on “Intervention.” His “How to Buy Links Without ‘Buying Links’” segment involved more roundabout (read: untraceable) methods of link exchange. Less drug lord, more money laundering, then. “It pays to have alternatives,” he said. Fishkin suggested the nonprofit route, acquiring links via event sponsorships and online charities. Buying food for an event, or supplying t-shirts, etc., and thereby earning a sponsor’s link means “essentially you aren’t directly buying a link.” Bullet points for this process: Find nonprofits/charities online Locate sponsorship pages Check to see links pass juice, then get in touch Avoid the standard donation forms and personally check with the webmaster about listings Another way of buying links without buying them is indirectly bribing bloggers with free stuff and then following up with an email. “Don’t ask for a link. Ask if they liked the product.” Yeah, slick right?      

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Matt Cutts posted a note about Google being in position to handle paid link report submissions from the Internet community; Michael Gray complained about the fairness of the request.A long time part of the ranking of sites for given keywords in search results includes inbound links. The more links connecting anchor text to a site, the more that site is seen as authoritative in the search rankings. Move up the rankings to the first page of search results at Google, especially in the top five for a given query, and the relative traffic for the query should easily outdistance that from lower ranked search results. To get that bonus placement, many webmasters over the years purchased links from other sites in order to gain an advantage. As the practice grew, even though links are not the sole arbiter of where a site ranks, Google began looking for ways to weed out these paid placements. So when Matt Cutts followed up his chat with Eric Enge by advising people it would be a good time to drop new paid link reports on Google, Michael Gray responded with a lengthy complaint about Google's chasing of paid links. "Your rules are selectively enforced and you take an aggressive hard line stance against Internet marketers, while little Mary A-List gets off scot-free," Gray said of Google and its treatment of high-profile bloggers who receive valuable offline considerations in exchange for their coverage of companies. Gray wants to see Google pursue the so-called A-List of bloggers, determine whether or not they picked up some kind of benefit in exchange for favorable blogging, and penalize them the same way Google penalizes link sellers. "Why does Google aggressively go after the SEOs and ignore the PR people? Why do people continue to tolerate Google’s double standards and two-tiered justice?" Gray asked. One might argue that quality comes into the equation. A link from a high-profile blogger to someplace of relevance and value means more to the person who discovers it than a link to a site that does not provide anything approaching an equally quality experience. In either example Gray gave, PR-purchased blog coverage versus a webmaster to webmaster paid link opportunity, a benefit goes from one party to the other. The difference is no blogger worth his or her keyboard would ever admit to being influenced by the largess given out as part of a PR campaign. A little equal treatment may be helpful. But Google will need an army of investigators to dig into even a small selection of high-profile blogs, in order to figure out if a relationship between a blogger and a linked site merits action. We don't see that happening for a reason beyond the obvious. Google wants to drive out the influence of paid links, but they don't want to push the A-list of bloggers into simply using other means of getting the word out about their posts. Imagine if the best way to figure out what a Gray or a Cutts had to say was by tracking the topics they cover without using Google search. Online forums abound when it comes to webmaster topics, of course. Social media and shared bookmarking sites each offer people the chance to be a network of like-minded interests. Drop in participation on a messaging service like Twitter or FriendFeed, and there's little reason to proactively search when relevance from either person arrives unbidden. Imagine that scenario, where for a particular interest, Google just isn't as important. Not every niche would draw similar interest; don't look for Google to fold or for its founders and CEOs to give away their billions to live as fudge-cooking Trappist monks as search traffic falls to zero. The seeds to do more without Google exist. It's up to people who hold views like Gray's to plant and water them.

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Give yourselves a hand, folks.  In Google's fight against webspam and paid links, you've apparently played an important role, and in the future, the company's hoping you'll participate even more.Remember those webspam and paid links reporting options in the Webmaster Help Group?  They're not black holes. The Webmaster Help GroupOn the Webmaster Central Blog, Google's Reid Yokoyama instead reveals, "Over the last year, users have submitted thousands and thousands of paid link reports to Google . . . .  These reports are actively reviewed, and the feedback is invaluable to improve our search algorithms.  We also are willing to take manual action on a significant fraction of paid link reports as we continue to improve our algorithms."All in all, "[T]he hard work of users who have already reported paid links has helped improve the quality of our index for millions."A similar story has formed around the topic of webspam, with users' reports being responsible for at least some of the 450-plus improvements made to Google's algorithms last year.It's too bad the company's not offering shares of stock or cash in return, but by documenting problems, it looks like you're making genuine contributions to Google and its search community.

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Matt Cutts told Mike McDonald of WebProNews about something new from Google: the search advertising company opened a little help center on the topic of nofollows and links.Google began advocating the nofollow attribute as a way for webmasters to tell Google's crawlers not to count a given link toward the PageRank of the site pointed to by the link. This attribute would help webmasters avoid the sting of being punished over paid links, which Google dislikes due to the way they can "game" the search rankings. Webmasters had questions about nofollow, the answers to which ended up flung across the Internet. Blogger Li Evans asked Google in February why that situation hadn't been cleared up by collecting all the answers in one place. As Google's well-known webspam fighter Matt Cutts told WebProNews how Google finally addressed the situation. They opened up the NoFollow Help Center within the webmaster help pages to help clarify the topic. As Google explains, nofollow helps manage issues like comment spam, crawl prioritization, and the touchy issue of paid links. Watch Matt Cutts go over this attention-getting topic only on WebProVideo:

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Network Solutions really didn't need any more public relations disasters after the controversy of automatically registering searched-for domains and "protecting" them for a $35 fee. Though this new controversy may not be quite the hyperbole it's made out to be in some places, it does come with some potentially serious issues.Network Solutions Logo(Photo Credit: Network Solutions)TechCrunch reported NetSol was "hijacking" unassigned subdomains and slapping spammy paid links on them. The proprietor of GotGame.com was surprised to learn that app.gotgame.com (no longer in service since news broke) had links to online poker sites, courtesy of NetSol. It was later reported that GoDaddy has a similar unused subdomain practice.Commentators at the TechCrunch thread sang a rousing march of class action lawsuit potentiality. NetSol appeared to be riding the cash cow under webmaster radar. Hang on a second and I'll find another metaphor to end this paragraph with: Over 300,000 known subdomains were revealed to have more spam than a grocery store shelf.I guess, technically, that's not a metaphor.ArsTechnica, though, took the time to dig into NetSol's 59,000-word Service Agreement (yick) and shovel out a load of legalese that says NetSol customers may have indeed given permission to have any inactive webpage on their site used as a spam shelf.Having the language buried in a EULA agreement doesn't necessarily let NetSol off the hook for shady behavior, though. Back when Eliot Spitzer was still on top of the world, he didn't have any qualms about suing and fining companies for being sneaky like that. The Electronic Frontier Foundation hasn't been too friendly toward unfair EULAs, either.At least NetSol allows customers to opt out of the program in their account settings. Opt-out policies themselves are controversial—just ask Google and Facebook.What's not clear yet, though, is whether the links placed on the websites pass PageRank, thus creating a Google penalty bull's eye, amid a number of other SEO concerns. Network Solutions did not get back with me yet about whether the links are no follow or whether there was any way the link pages could affect a website's search ranking.  

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The pointy boot came down hard on more websites recently as Google knocked PageRank off sites for their paid link activities. If you sell it for PageRank, or buy it for PageRank, Google may burn your site's PageRank in response. The search engine has been fighting to clean up its index of listings Google considers of lesser value to searchers. More penalties appear to have been doled out recently, according to Search Engine Roundtable. A discussion at Digital Point suggested too much interlinking of a publisher's sites could be a problem. One poster affected by Google's recent activity confirmed having interlinks. All is not lost for webmasters who keep an eye on their PR scores. They can either remove the offending links, or nofollow them, and hope a reinclusion request finds a sympathetic eye at Google. Or they can take the Andy Beard route, and prevent Google from indexing paid link pages with a robots.txt directive. The latter strategy means giving up on potential Google traffic in the hopes of drawing visitors from alternative sources. For Beard at least, that choice made more sense than altering links on his pages.

google pagerank link paid links nthe search engine activity beard sites pages recently publisher appear knock index means continues confirm

Andy Beard has hit upon a compromise between removing text links from his site and being summarily punished by Google for selling them. By banning Google's crawler, Googlebot, from pages that might offend the search ad company, Beard said he is "lowering the red flag." "I have spent a long time deciding on a course of action, and have decided that blocking my content using Robots.txt is ultimately better for me, and better for people hiring my services," he said. "It also happens to be worse for Google than currently, but that is the beauty of this strategy." When he writes a paid review, Beard plans to place an entry in his robots.txt file to keep Google from crawling it. If Google doesn't index the page, the company should have no issues with the review potentially affecting search rankings. Beard has a method to his seeming madness, namely several options for syndicating his content to reach an audience: social bookmarking, hub pages, authorized and unauthorized syndication, indexed search results & aggregators, and multimedia to attract universal search. "Nofollow is not the answer to Google's troubles," Beard said of Google's preferred method of treating links. "As Google seem determined to impose the letter of the law rather than the spirit, I can't see a reason why I shouldn't sidestep the charging bull." If his experiment goes well for his site and the companies he reviews, we won't be surprised to see more bloggers emulate his strategy.

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It seems it was only a matter of time before the cleverer element of the SEO world developed a workaround for Google's penalizing of paid links. The workaround involves a pretty creative "dynamic" linking strategy, and it's playing a little bit dirty.No longer the province of tax accountants, lawyers, and politicians, an elaborate loophole has been developed by Andy Beard proposing how to get around Google's paid-link vigilance via robots.txt and paid reviews.*Beard's explanation is complicated, lengthy, and loaded with historical context so visit Beard's blog for further clarification, complete with nifty diagrams. What we will provide here is an overview and basic introduction, and not necessarily an endorsement.Beard's proposal (or as he describes it, a red flag in the face of the charging bull) involves strategic use of robots.txt to redirect Google crawlers away from paid reviews. This is intended to take the penalty sting away as Google can't penalize for what it's not supposed to crawl in the first place.In addition to the paid review that is blocked from crawlers, the author creates a follow-up review at another domain that is not paid and links back to the original review, with link juice in-tow. According to Beard, a client would pay for the original domain link, but the not the follow-up on a separate domain (but I imagine the price just got higher, huh?).The link on the paid review is not a nofollow link, meaning that it will still also pass PageRank since Google shouldn't know or care about it if it can't be crawled, and the link on the follow-up review is also not a nofollow because it's, technically, not a paid link.  In theory, the original, blocked review will still pass a reduced amount of PageRank because Google still links to "dangling" pages, or pages it can't see, if there are backlinks pointing to the page. The link juice it passes, however, is reduced, as is the link juice coming from backlinks to it. What happens next is a matter of determination and scale.With enough backlinks (according to my understanding), especially authority backlinks, the decrease in link-juice can be overcome, thereby raising the blocked page's PageRank eventually, which is then passed on to its intended paid review/link recipient.Phew! So, it's kind of like link-laundering.Your first objection is probably that Google's pretty vigilant about link-spam, too, and bursts of low-quality links over a short period of time will raise the spam alarms, thus either earning penalties anyway or negating the collective power of those links.Quite right, which is why Andy has a plan for that too. This is where it gets a bit harder, since it involves a real commitment to getting that paid link some good juice to pass along. But it probably should be a part of your overall web-marketing campaign already and anyway. Beard proposes getting authority links via:Social bookmarking: A short description, a title, and a link from BloggingZoom, Digg or other social site is all that is needed to carry a decent, relevant amount of link juice to the target.Targeted RSS syndication: Syndicate the article, make sure it links back. Send to "hub pages" on content sites that accept syndicated articles via RSS (because Google won't be looking in RSS feeds, either). Aggregators (which will index a snippet and a link) like Technorati also make use of RSS feeds.Authorized and unauthorized article syndication: Beard syndicates his articles to other publications with high PageRank. Link back to an un-crawled page from there and you've given it some much-needed power. What he calls "unauthorized syndication" we usually call "scraping." On the bright side, publishers can make the most of scrapers by not making a fuss, and instead requiring a link.Targeting Universal Search: Use images, video/audio descriptions, etc., in unpaid content (which is also syndicated, I assume, to sites intended for that type of format) to point back to paid content.If Google doesn't find a way to penalize, it could be a viable (if involved) strategy. But it is also more akin to traditional web marketing—taking advantage of the channels you have to promote.** It's doubtful that less legitimate paid linkers will take the time and effort to promote this way, but you have to admire Beard's never-say-die attitude.     *This all hinges, of course, on whether it will work and for how long, and how much you rely on Google as a search-traffic generator. The hard truth is that Google is the defacto search engine on the Net, so making el Goog happy whether or not you agree with el Goog's decrees is an important part of the game. And nobody likes unhappy el Goog.**Google's penalties seem also to be forcing webmasters to do (nearly) legitimate content and marketing work, which is an interesting side-development.    

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Central hubs on the web fight off manipulation to keep their status and profit margins in tact. A side effect of this war on control over information access is the butchering of the English language. Digg is Illegal? Digg's CEO Jay Adelson said: I'm sure there could be blackmailers out there. We absolutely know that every single day, people try to game our system. Users are involved in illegal or inappropriate activities all the time. They try to set up fake accounts to promote a story. The thing is, we make changes to our algorithm on a regular basis. We plan for that. Notice how he put illegal and inappropriate right next to each other, as to equate them. This comes from the same company that published this: We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code. But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be. If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying. Sure you can buy votes on Digg, and they arbitrarily ban websites. But does controlling a bunch of worthless traffic give them the right to butcher language to push their business objectives? Google is Illicit? Michael Gray's continued debate about the war on links spurred on additional conversation. Why is the Yahoo! Directory Considered a Legitimate Link Buy? In addition to what Jim said, I also believe the following play a role: They predate Google. Google needs some sort of baseline. The directory business model is horrifically inefficient and poses no risk to Google's market dominence. (Yahoo! demoted it in favor of Yahoo! Answers. Even the Google Directory, a DMOZ clone, has a higher PageRank than the Yahoo! Directory does.) Few other sites are comparable to the Yahoo! Directory (especially after the Google directory purge of 2007), so it is not a technique that can't be easily and profitably be replicated like paying for reviews. The truth is independent link sellers often exercise more control than directory editors do. The entire Business.com directory of over 65,000 categories is managed by 6 editors (source). How could they possibly review stuff as well as you or I do? They can't. But if we all do our business in a direct to direct exchange fashion the central networks and search engines do not get a cut of the action. Why Google is Different than Digg Unlike Digg users looking to waste time, searchers have real targeted intent and real value. In response to Michael Gray's post Danny Sullivan said: But if he wants to stand up to Google, take the lead and block him from crawling his site -- and encourage others to do the same. ... No one has a right to Google traffic. Follow the rules, as stupid as they are, if you want it. If don't like the rules, sure, complain about them -- but don't argue they're robbing you of anything that is supposedly "yours." But unplugging from Google is not as simple as blocking them in robots.txt. They can still pay others to steal your work and wrap it in their ads. They change the guidelines on an as needed basis (use nofollow or else), apply them unevenly (why is TLA penalized when TextLinkBrokers still ranks?), and if they don't like you they can penalize other businesses associated with you. Michael pointed out that the Google's Webmaster Guidelines butcher the word illicit. In response Danny wrote: Michael, illicit as used on the Google Webmaster Guildelines page is defined by however Google wants to define it -- in that case, doing stuff against the guidelines. When the networks screw people over it is the fault of "users" or "the algorithm," but when the central networks do not like what we do we are "criminals performing illicit acts." You know what is illicit? Adultery. And Google ads recommend it. Recently Google has been more than fair to me, but if they want to use the language they are using to try to control others, they need to clean up their ad network. Just because an ad has a high CPC and gets a high CTR does not mean that it is not immoral or illegal. Plenty of people commit crime. Comments

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Don't buy paid links! Paid links are bad! Don't cloak either. Search engines don't allow it. You've all heard this before right?>>> What are your thoughts on paid links? Do you agree with Google's hard line? Comment here... Well as it turns out, not ALL search engines are as hard line on these issues as some claim to be. MSN Live specifically has now gone on the record that none of the above are necessarily taboo. Over the holiday break, Jeremiah Andrick, product manager for MSN Live Webmaster Tools, stopped by our offices. We did a lengthy video interview where we chatted about all kinds of good searchy things. Highlights of our chat included some of the emerging differences between Live Search and engines like Google on subjects like cloaking and paid links. Google doesn't like cloaking because it can be used to spam and fool their crawler. Google doesn't like paid links because their algorithm places such a high emphasis on links as a quality indicator, and paid linking subverts their system's integrity. Google's solution to these problems has basically been to disallow paid links and cloaking and punish the sites that disregard their rules by penalizing or even booting them from the index. Much to my surprise, MSN isn't exactly following Google in this regard. They obviously aren't going to recommend anyone use cloaking and paid links, but they don't discount either practice as forbidden. MSN Live Search is becoming a lot more interesting. Initially, Microsoft's revamped search product drew some criticism for being basically a Google spin off in appearance, with less than stellar results. The folks in Redmond haven't just been sitting around though. The quality of their results has shown some nice progress, but more impressive (and promising) has been the quantum leaps they've made in terms of communicating with the webmaster community. Paid Links: In our video interview, you might notice that Jeremiah says to avoid paid links. Apparently, the Live Search crew has reevaluated their stance on paid links. Live Search's Nathan Buggia, in an email on the subject of paid linking said the following: "Paid links are a gray area. Are they of value to the end user? Sometimes they are. Often they're less valuable and less relevant than the organic links on a page. We reserve the right to treat them that way." The operative phrase here is "a gray area". That's not saying paid links are forbidden or evil or a bannable offense. Some paid links are crap, some… not so much so. Live Search is working on methods to evaluate and qualify links - paid or otherwise - before they ascribe authority to them. When Jeremiah says in the video to avoid paid links, it would be more appropriate to rephrase that as 'avoid bad (irrelevant/junk) linking'. Indexing issues: Webmasters have issues with Live Search indexing sites properly. I asked Jeremiah what he thought people were running into when Live Search wasn't properly indexing them. Jeremiah said most indexing issues fall into one of three categories: 1. Problems with design 2. Problems with content 3. Technological issues According to Jeremiah, "It tends to be technological issues, or the content itself, that's the problem," when people are having trouble being indexed correctly. "Most people are kind of hip to using better structure in their site," so design isn't as often the culprit. Jeremiah cited a mix between design and content as a specific problem. "Most publishing systems and CMSs a lot of people are using were designed 3 or 4 years ago," he said, before the now widespread recognition of the importance of crawlability and SEO in site design. As a result, some of these systems aren't exactly the most efficient or effective in making a site's content crawlable. In terms of being totally optimized, Jeremiah said, "People do what they can, but I don't think they always do enough or that they are not necessarily doing the right things". But even under ideal circumstances, Jeremiah admits "you're not going to get everybody and you're not going to get everything out of everybody." As proof, Jeremiah offered a poignant example: "MSDN TechNet is a tier 1 site with eight or nine million documents in 42 different languages... I can tell you that it is not 100% indexed." Their goal is likely common to all search engines... 100% indexability of everything. But that is just not a reality at this stage of search evolution. Cloaking: We're all pretty clear on Google's position on cloaking by now. It's a pretty simple and straightforward 'no'. Never. Under no circumstances. It's evil, it's bad, it's spammy. Don't do it. While MSN Live doesn't exactly endorse cloaking, they do seem to have a slightly softer stance on the issue. Jeremiah and I talked about companies who make heavy use of Flash and other non indexable graphics on their sites. At one point, we talked about Nike, whose site is made completely out of Flash. Jeremiah was quite up front about it, saying, "They break some of our rules just to get to the point where they can get all of their content indexed. They do a bit of cloaking and things like that." Google of course, still indexes Nike. I'm pretty sure if MSN knows they cloak, Google can probably figure it out as well. I don't look for Nike to suffer any Google penalties - much less be thrown out of the index for it though. However, if you aren't Nike but maybe just a smaller webmaster, I don't know that you'd be afforded the same considerations from Google. I'd just about bet on it. On one hand you have Google, who apparently selectively enforces their strict no-cloaking policy depending on who you are. On the other hand, you have MSN saying sure, it goes on and while we don't encourage it, we aren't necessarily going to boot you from the index for it. Interesting, no? Conclusions: At the end of the day, we didn't hear too much in our video that we haven't heard a few times before from every other search engine. Jeremiah told us in terms of SEO, "It's always the basics. Keep it clean, let's try to be natural, and as Live Search grows we're going to try to provide better results for people when we're able to do that algorithmically." All pretty standard party line stuff. With the exception of their obvious difference in their stance on cloaking, and paid links, it could have been a Matt Cutts interview in many respects. It's not so much what was said, as it was who was saying it. Keep in mind, this is Microsoft. Typically, they don't say diddly – or didn't used to, at least. I think this interview may be emblematic of an interesting movement going on at Microsoft. Traditionally, MS has been perceived as a closed empire - operating secretly behind closed doors, dispensing information strictly on a 'need to know' (or as subpoenaed) basis. Recently though, they seem to be trying to reach out a lot more. Take for example, some of Jeremiah's quotes: "The thing that Nathan and I are trying to do, and that is to bring more transparency… We want to endear ourselves to you and want you to want to work with us." From Microsoft? Really? Then on GameSpy I see an email from their Xbox division publicly apologizing for holiday problems with the Xbox Live network. Could this be a kinder, gentler Microsoft emerging in 2008? And more importantly, will it lead to more marketshare for Live Search and more traffic for site owners?Do you agree with Microsoft? Do you agree with Google? What are your experiences with paid links? Comment here...

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In an earlier post I chastised Google for giving straight links to partners, However now I’ve found a whole bunch more... Here’s a Google adwords customer Happy Hounds getting an editorially approved link from Google, lets not forget twiddy.com or cordarounds.com not to worry while they may keep other robots out but they let googlebot in in robots.txt (that was close they almost complied with their own guidelines on that one). Here’s a bunch more from Google Checkout. ...and here’s some from Google analytics you have to click the merchants name but the link for “learn more on their site” looks clean to me. Don’t worry askthebuilder on Google adsense we didn’t forget that you are giving out editorially approved links too. Matt Cutts commented that some of the links in the first post were Ok because they were editorially given. However it seems google is pretty loose with links being editorially given with their partners. Maybe linkbrokers just need to start rebranding themselves as “editorial link partners” for 2008 Comments

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In a Q&A session at SMX Advanced in Seattle, Google's Matt Cutts talked at length about paid links. He was asked several questions about this. Google recently announced it is now reading javascript and acting upon it. In the past, the advice given out has been if you have paid links, you should either nofollow those paid links or use javascript because Google didn't read it. When asked about this, Matt says Googlebot has gotten smarter. He notes that Google began changing its messaging on this around 2007-2008 to stop mentioning javascript but to nofollow or do a redirect through a URL which is blocked through robots.txt. Cutts says this a very secure way to do it. Cutts says the interesting thing is that even on the onclick in javascript, the crawl and indexing team has submitted code so that it will respect a rel="nofollow" so you can put a rel="nofollow" attribute on a link that's running in javascript and in the majority of cases Google will make sure it doesn't float pagerank even if they're executing the javascript. He says that if you want to be completely safe, nofollow or link through things that are blocked. Someone then asked Matt how long they have to fix their sites if they didn't know about this. Cutts reponded by saying that javascript has not been a problem in the vast majority of cases. "If you look at the major ad networks, they tend to be doing redirects through or iframes on things that are blocked out on robots.txt anyway." He does say that Google should probably put up a blog post about it though. A Vanessa Fox article about how javascript is executed and crawled these days was also referenced. Cutts thinks the other search engines are moving in the direction of having more sophisticated bots as well. You may have heard that Google gave away Android phones at its recent developer conferences. This was brought up in comparison to paid links. Cutts basically says that it was not Google's intent to acquire links, and that the move was more aimed at putting Android phones in the hands of developers to inspire the development of apps. Google doesn't need paid links itself. He says they don't even think about getting links as far as their own stuff. Cutts also talked about the Federal Trade Commission's stance, which basically just looks to see if there is material connection to linking. Are you getting something of monetary value for a link? Contests were also brought up in this light. If you're making people link to you to get into a contest where they can win a prize, that's close to money for links. "If you're doing a contest, don't make it explicitly your role to try to get links," he says. From this part of the Q&A there seemed to be two main points that Cutts wanted to make clear: 1. There's a spectrum of how money is involved and there's a spectrum of how people are trying to manipulate or spam the search engines. The majority of the stuff Google sees is where there is money being paid directly for links. 2. As a webmaster, you can do whatever you want on your site. "It's your site and it's your choice," he says. Google also has the right to choose what they want to display in their index. If you are interested in learning about other things Cutts discussed in the Q&A, check out the following articles: - Duplicate Content not an Everyday Problem - How to Avoid Google Penalties with AJAX and display:none - Google 'Evaporating' Excess PageRank - Matt Cutts Opens Up About Google Penalties - How Google Handles Google Bowling

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There have been a couple of pretty interesting articles written this week that ask a legitimate (if not somewhat sensationalized) question:  Does Google consider SEOs to be criminals? SEOs being SEOs are, by definition, people who make a living trying to manipulate the results of search engines.  Now, before you eat me alive here... I don’t necessarily mean manipulate in a negative sense.  But in many aspects ‘optimization’ and ‘manipulation’ are somewhat interchangeable terms. An SEO ‘optimizes’ a site in an attempt to enhance that site’s search engine rank or placement.  By moving a site in the results, you are, by definition, manipulating the results. There is nothing wrong with that.  There are lots of sites that aren’t ‘search engine friendly’ and lots of sites that just do things ‘wrong’ that, when fixed, will notice an enhancement in their positioning for search queries relevant to their site.  Search engines don’t mind this.  The existence of resources like Webmaster Central are a testament to this.  So the search engines have rules for SEOs and the SEOs can either choose to follow the rules, or they can not follow the rules and face the consequences.  The ‘foul’ being called by Michael Gray and Lisa Barone however is maybe SEOs are being subjected to something of a double standard. Google is pretty hard line on paid links.  That’s common knowledge. All SEOs know this and several of them have been taken to task in the past for paid or ‘incentivized’ linking campaigns.  Everybody in the business knows paying for links  - whether the payment be cash or some other ‘benefit’ - is considered a big time no-no by Google. Michael and Lisa suggest however that there are lots of people getting by with just that - paying/rewarding inbound links - without suffering repercussions from Google.  Just recently, as Michael points out, Google themselves decided to give away the new and unreleased version of their new Google phone to attendees.  The giveaway sparks lots of articles, lots of blog posts and yes... lots of links and attention for the new Google phone.  Is that incentivizing inbound links? Is it a promotional stunt?  Is there a difference?  Michael says that android picked up 50,000 new links within 24 hours of the giveaway. Sure, lots of sites picked up the news about the Google Ion (the proper name of the phone) ...  but I don’t think they posted a specific link for people to point to, nor did they make the awarding of a phone contingent upon some sort of review or plug for the product.  So, in that sense, I would have to call this one a little ‘iffy’ - 50,000 links is an AWFUL lot of links though, isn’t it? But does Google care about links?  Why on Earth would they?  They may have had an agenda with the giveaway, sure... but I would think it would be to generate buzz for Android... not accrue inbound links.  But isn’t one just as good as the other?  I dunno...  Now as to whether or not an SEO would suffer some penalty if their client gave away some product to generate some buzz, I don’t know.  I’d like to think they wouldn’t.  I guess the devil would be in the details on that one.  It certainly is an interesting thing to think about though.  Does this constitute a double standard?  Would an SEO or their client catch Google’s fury if they tried a similar promotional stunt? Here’s another example.  Guy Kawasaki, super high profile blogger, Twitterer and all around social media mogul A lister was given a CAR for a while.  Audi sent him an Audi R8 in exchange for him blogging about the car.  I don’t know if you know what an Audi R8 is, but it’s really really cool and expensive and Iron Man drove one in the movie... and I guess Audi knew exactly what they were doing because we are still linking to them months later over the Kawasaki post.  The Audi example is a little tougher to rationalize.  it was clear that Audi loaned Kawasaki a super hot rod sports car on the condition that he blog about driving it and how great and awesome and fun it was.  Audi knew that Kawasaki has a huge following, he’s extremely plugged into the industry and such a post would doubtlessly spawn tons and tons of talk (and links) in for the R8.  I don’t know for sure, but I doubt he lost any clout in terms of his Google standing. Now if Ferrari were to send a high profile SEO type fellow a new Ferrari for a month in exchange for him blogging about it, would Google drop the hammer?  I don’t know.  Maybe?  On one hand, I guess if I’m Audi and I loan a car to somebody with the name recognition of a Guy Kawasaki, then I’m just considering that like a compensated endorsement.  We see and hear those on TV and radio every day.  Nothing wrong with that, right? I’m not too sure I am ready to fully come down on either side of this one 100%.  I hate to come across as a Google apologist, but at the same time I can’t say that Gray and Barone don’t raise some fairly compelling arguments.  Do I think Google ‘has it in’ for SEOs?  I would have to say no.  If you asked me if I thought Google was maybe a little more... ‘leery’ of big promotional stunts that came directly from SEOs?  Maybe, but as any SEO can tell you, there are no shortage of shady SEOs.  Sometimes the good guys get lumped in with the bad guys a little bit in the name of the greater good don’t they.... (cough cough) Patriot Act ring any bells? Anyway, it’s an interesting concept to consider. My buddy Barry has a poll up collecting some responses which should be interesting.  I am extremely interested to see where WebProNews readers fall on this concept too, so make sure you sound off in the comments section.

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