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Apr
16
12
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Matt Cutts Wages Jihad On Paid Links |
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In Google's latest blatant exhibition of ridiculousness, Matt Cutts has now created an informal way to report paid links. Matt, of course, like Mr. Ahmadinejad over in Iran, blames it on the Brits: "One thing I heard at SES London was that people wanted a way to report paid links specifically." Damn those Brits. Damn them to hell! So here's how to report paid links: 1. Sell your soul. Matt does claim its only to collect data to dogfood some algorithmic approaches; but I don't buy it. If he wanted to do that, he'd just scrape text-link-ads.com and a few other high profile link brokers. Don't get me wrong. I'm all for detecting paid links algorithmically. But tell me, Google; are you going to penalize topix.com, Answers.com, Scientific America, Forbes? They all sell paid links (some of them, rather pricey!). Or are you just going to start frustrating the little guy while providing immunity to the worst offenders? After all, cloaking is A-OK for The New York Times, but would get me nuked … My take on text links is in my black hat chapter in my SEO Book: On Buying Links We consider buying links completely ethical, so long as the links are semantically related. Realistically, a content provider can reject placing your link on their site if it is not relevant, and if they consider it relevant, there is no reason the authors can think of to include the rel="nofollow" attribute. It is trusted, audited content. Buying links, when done properly, is not a black hat technique in and of itself. When done aggressively and improperly (irrelevent links, identical anchor text, etc.), it may, however, be perceived as spamming by a search engine." So it's final. You're probably a black hatter. Welcome to the dark side! A more nefarious idea was proposed by "Jeffrey" on Matt's blog: "Cool! I will quickly buy some links for my competitors on text link ads and then denounce him. Good idea, thanks Matt." Cute. Note that this post on Matt's blog, as Carsten Cumbrowski points out is a definite step backwards for Google. Relevant paid links should not raise any red flags — or require a rel,nofollow attribute. Related posts: Why Google is Wrong on Paid Links I think paid links are just dandy! In every other... Matt Cutts Gems: Part III This is a summary of the videos located at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/video-reinclusion-requests/... Mattcuttsarama: 21 Great SEO Tips From Google's Matt Cutts This is a compilation of stuff Matt Cutts has said... Matt Cutts Brand(tm) Gems Matt Cutts has a blog filled with lots of good... Matt Cutts Gems: Part II This is a summary of the videos located at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/another-two-videos/...
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"12 Wise Comments Banged Out Somewhere On The Internet ..."
What a great chance to bowl some of your competitors out of business, in case link selling is part of their business model: . Denounce them for selling links Upon further thinking, there's even an impact on the open source movement: Selling links is a significant revenue stream for quite a few independent open source programmers, it keeps them in business and pays for their web hosting fees.
Pathetic. A company that sells over $10 billion a year of temporary text links (PPC) won't allow permanent ones? Hypocritical, at best.
Hi Jaimie, 1st the good stuff: congrats to your and Cristian's book finally being done and printed. Now, paid links. I had a major rant about that over a month ago at SEJ already. My strong language and extreme references were completely misunderstood (by Matt and others). I edited the post, moved the original post and comments to my personal website and added a note and link to the edited post. I don't know if you saw it. Here is my original (raw and unedited) rant.. Matt did back then not answer my question about affiliate links (paid links?) and also did not today or yesterday at his blog. I refuse to add nofollow to links on my site. I make recommendations and yes, I link with affiliate links where they are available. So it is editorial and my opinion. Adding nofollow to the links would make me a liar, wouldn't it. It's like making a promise and cross fingers behind the back. His silence about affiliate marketing worries me more than his statements, but I know that he mentioned affiliates once (= yes, paid links), but the discussion was a bit different back then. Google applies a different set of standards at Paid Search affiliates too, so hitting them in organic search does not make a difference for them, probably. I blogged about that at ReveNews. Check out the Video by Kris Jones/Pepperjam the post refers to. Cheers!
I have great respect for engineer Matt Cutts. Too bad Google makes him do (or tell) some of the dirty work. I'm pretty sure this cheap reporting idea was in the works for a while, and is not a reaction of popular requests at SES London. What a joke. I'm strill struggling to understand what's the real usefulness of the data they're collecting.
My pragmatic thoughts about Google's paid link reporting: 1. Google wouldn't use this tool to find and penalize any web sites. They already have all the data in the world. A business like Google is interested in obtaining patterns and understanding social behavior of the masses. My guess is the data they're collecting is helping them along these lines, nothing more. 2. Matt says that Google doesn't want paid links to influence PageRank. However, I'm not sure this is fair, *even* when the paid links are not semantically related. When used decently, paying for links is just another form of marketing, and marketing was never a "fair" game. When used inappropriately, the economics of the web, and the market reaction, should naturally penalize the affected web sites, even with Google's existing algorithms. All we need is to give things time, "Web 2.0″ is still so young. 3. What I'm really bothered about is that the whole idea of reporting sounds really cheap. Other than that, I doubt that Google's paid link reporting will change anything. The idea is funny, yes, but does it deserve any real attention? I think not. I have to admit, Google is so good at creating buzz out of nothing. I wonder when Yahoo and MSN will wake up.
Cristian: I would be glad, if your thought would be just it, but I believe that this is not the case. Links ARE Google, even with a heavily altered PageRank algorithm and other factors, are links the foundation and core of their ranking algorithm. The Google "Sandbox Effect" which has to do with their trust factors and "creation" of trusted authority sites is faltering too. There is no trusted authority site out there anymore where Google can be sure that the site does not link to bad neighborhoods or for making money of it. That links to sites that promote "pills" etc. on .EDU domains still do miracles for ranking shows how good or bad Google is in determining relevancy. I heard that how bad of a job they are doing was demonstrated and shown to people (and Google) at SES NY. If they can't figure that out, more and more of their precious SERPs will go down the drain and become more polluted with SPAM, which they can't detect. They fall back to scare tactics, but those scare tactics can become very real, when they realize that "barking" alone will not do it anymore (people will figure that out, trust me on that). They will have to "bite" eventually to show that they can and do it. Who's business would you like to use as fall guy? Yours? Mine? Somebody else's?
Carsten, I'm not arguing with any of your comments. It's obvious that search engines still have lots of work to do to improve their algorithms and clean up their SERPs. I just don't think that Google, or any other search engine, would penalize websites based solely on such "link buying reports". As many have noticed, such a behavior wouldn't do any good. My feeling is that such reports can only be used to gather statistics, and to improve algorithms. And I think this is a cheap way to improve your algorithms
Cris: No Google will not just penalize because of a report. If Google does start penalizing webmasters for having paid links that are technically relevant for search engines (no nofollow, plain HTML), guess what happens? People will stop selling links? Right. Google will never be able to PROOF that a spammer was buying a link and an unethical webmaster was being paid. It can only be circumstantial evidence and that will hit the wrong people. SO, don't even start with that, because it will not help Google much, but hurt a lot of innocent or people that don't know and never did stuff for SEO reasons, because they don't even know what that is.
I have tried to report spam to google but I didn't get any answer……. a few times I tried……but no luck….looks like the only way is to update their algorithm. As long as for payed links , this is totally wrong….I think it will bring a new kind of services to the intrenet to get around that…..
What about paid text links in directories? Google's Webmaster Guidelines recommend buying a text link in Yahoo's directory and "other industry-specific expert sites". Google Gets To Decide Who You Sell Advertising To[...] Matt Cutts has invented a "link spam" reporting mechanism that is designed to deal with these issues. So much for the idea of algorhythmically dealing with spam. Matt does claim its only to collect data to dogfood some algorithmic approaches; but I don't buy it. If he wanted to do that, he'd just scrape text-link-ads.com and a few other high profile link brokers. Don't get me wrong. I'm all for detecting paid links algorithmically. [...]
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