horrible news from google

[Kyle]

Read this post AND the comments: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-to-report-paid-links/

Now I have just started reading the comments to this post, and I haven't seen a follow up comment by Matt yet... but this is VERY serious. I'm hoping after I finish going through the comments, Matt elaborates on this more.

Post your thoughts, and I (or anyone who finds new info before me) will post updates as I find them.

[Kyle]

Matt also posted this on the same day (today)..
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/hidden-links/

In this post, he says if you sell text links, you need to make sure pagerank is not passed. He gives examples of using rel=nofollow, or configuring your robots.txt.

[Kyle]

I don't buy links myself, but I think this can get complicated... and I find it weird how they are asking webmasters to submit data. As if the data they need is hard to find?

The good news, is when they start putting a stop to link purchasing (to the best of their abilities), it will help level the playing field for small sites.

This may encourage more garbage sites to be created. People may get into the business of creating a site on some highly profitable niche, buying massive amounts of links, then cashing in for the few months it ranks in search engines before being dropped.

What about directories?

What about free directories? Can they still rank on terms without the directory being penalized/blocked from sending PR? Will they get a filter (all except DMOZ, the exception to the rule as usual)?

This is all going to get very complicated.

[KLB]

This is a duplicate of Chris' thread on this issue and I've made my thoughts known about it in that thread. See: http://www.websitepublisher.net/forums/showthread.php?t=7588

[ZigE]

Google have to be seen to be doing something to skew the growing trend of scrappy sites buying there way to the top.

How they are going to be able to tell if a link is paid, is another thing. A Link is a link, and even if they manage to recognize the text-link-ads block style of ads, it is in turn going to go further underground.

But yes, interesting times ahead. It is going to be an uphill battle for google,

[Johnny Gulag]

This is a duplicate of Chris' thread on this issue and I've made my thoughts known about it in that thread. See: http://www.websitepublisher.net/forums/showthread.php?t=7588All of us cannot read that thread. :(

[KLB]

All of us cannot read that thread. :(

Sorry about that, I didn't notice the location of the thread.:blush:

[Dan Morgan]

Knee jerk is good from me. How they propose to police it is an issue, although at least the low hanging fruit will be dealt with quickly if there is any manual intervention.

Didn't phpbb get blacklisted for selling PR for a while...?

[stymiee]

I'm very happy they are doing this. This will mean people can't buy their way to the top and instead actually have to create a high quality website that people will want to link to naturally.

[agua]

I'm with Stymiee on this one - its doesn't seem too bad... all they are saying is you can't buy or sell PR - nothing too wrong with that

[MaxS]

I read this yesterday, it's definitely a substantial change. I just wonder how Text Link Ads, AdBrite, etc, will respond.


I'm very happy they are doing this. This will mean people can't buy their way to the top and instead actually have to create a high quality website that people will want to link to naturally.
I suppose it's good and bad. In theory, it sounds like a decent move, but I'm still wondering how they will execute this.

What about link exchanges?

[Selkirk]

By my reading, it only looked like they were collecting the information in order to calibrate their algorithms, not to manually penalize sites.

If you read the comments in the original post, Matt specifically says that AdBrite is fine because they use JavaScript to generate the links.

[Mike]

Text Link Ads could be another matter though (I believe they are just regular links?). Then again, penalizing them could be a good thing, there's a lot of spam on their sites.

[stymiee]

What about link exchanges?

Link exchanges don't involve money changing hands so it won't be affect by this. Although they clearly have been affected by other changes and aren't worthwhile anymore.

[Johnny Gulag]

Link exchanges don't involve money changing hands so it won't be affect by this. Although they clearly have been affected by other changes and aren't worthwhile anymore.How will they tell the differeence between a text link that has been paid for and a text link that was not paid for. Like the ones in my sig below, can anyone tell if someone paid me to add one there?

(PS - No one has paid me to link to my own sites. :p)

[Selkirk]

That's really the question, isn't it? How do they discount paid links without too much collateral damage? Really finding paid links is a subset of the problem of detecting "lack of editorial control."

I mentioned one way in a previous post (http://www.websitepublisher.net/forums/showpost.php?p=55786&postcount=17). This is the bad neighborhood theory. If you link to known bad things, google ignores your links. A variation of this is that you can detect a link seller if he links to known link buyers. Having a database of known link buyers would help tune this kind of algorithm.

A Bad neighborhood might be a score, not just a yes/no penalty. Also, it is possible that "distrust" may pass back through more than one level of linking. Think of it as a "reverse page rank." If this were true (see two clicks from lesbian porn (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/text-link-follow-up/)), you would be responsible not just for what you link to, but what the people you link to are linking to.

Another way to detect paid links is to look at phrase co-occurrance (http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.html&r=1&p=1&f=G&l=50&d=PG01&S1=20060294155.PGNR.&OS=dn/20060294155&RS=DN/20060294155) statistics. Boy, that "texas hold'em" link sure sticks out on your needlepoint site.

[KLB]

This whole mess is a slippery slope that will do nothing but hurt "legitimate" sites. Spammers and others will always find ways to buy and sell covert links that can't be differentiated from "normal" links.

The best move Google could make on this issue is simply to stop making PageRank a publicly known figure. The problem with buying and selling links started with Google publicizing PR via the toolbar. If they want to stop the buying and selling of links to affect PR then stop letting people know what their PR is.

What Google wants is for us to help them determine what is and what is not a "natural" link. This alone is completely artificial. Company X is paid to create a website for Company Y. Company X adds a link to Company Y on their website under their portfolio. Should Company X add "rel=nofollow", is this a paid link? Its stupid.

Again the only ones who will get hurt are those who try to be responsible. More than anything this will be a way for Google to cut off the ability of websites to sell advertising directly and without Google being able to get their "cut". The average advertiser isn't going to understand this whole issue and if I add rel="nofollow" or don't provide a direct link they will rightfully think I'm trying to play games with them. Furthermore encouraging the use of JavaScript links goes against the whole goal of accessibility.

This link buying might have NOTHING to do with buying PR, it might simply be a desire to buy advertising space directly from relevant websites, thereby cutting Google and the like out of the financial loop.

Don't get me wrong. I can see a problem with people trying to "buy" PR, but the problem can be easily resolved by ending the display of PR in the Google Toolbar. Really, the publishing of PR in the Google Toolbar in the first place has turned out to be the greatest disservice Google has done to the Internet as it created a whole industry of link buying that has done nothing but caused headaches for legitimate sites who would much rather focus on serving their user base and earning a honest living in the process.

[stymiee]

How will they tell the differeence between a text link that has been paid for and a text link that was not paid for. Like the ones in my sig below, can anyone tell if someone paid me to add one there?

(PS - No one has paid me to link to my own sites. )
Hard to say for sure but I would guess they would tell text mentioning selling links on that page or on that same domain. I bet some human review will be involved as well.

[Kyle]

Google wants to automate this, thats why they need data.
I have lost my trust in Google's methods of being fair to webmasters, so I see this causing many problems.

Even though the concept itself is great, and will really help out small time webmasters like ourselves...I worry about Google's methods.

[KLB]

Google wants to automate this, thats why they need data.
I have lost my trust in Google's methods of being fair to webmasters, so I see this causing many problems.

My thoughts exactly!!

While I'm more than happy to report MFA scraper sites, I do not see how our being Google's snitches in this case will be really good for us.

[MaxS]

Hard to say for sure but I would guess they would tell text mentioning selling links on that page or on that same domain. I bet some human review will be involved as well.
I highly doubt they will resort to human review. I don't know why I didn't mention this before, but they could simply ask link exchangers to use the nofollow attribute.

[ZigE]

I highly doubt they will resort to human review. I don't know why I didn't mention this before, but they could simply ask link exchangers to use the nofollow attribute.

Yeah, google will want this as automated as possible. However they have taken the liberty to discount bought text links on high PR sites like statcounter

[stymiee]

I highly doubt they will resort to human review. I don't know why I didn't mention this before, but they could simply ask link exchangers to use the nofollow attribute.


Yeah, google will want this as automated as possible. However they have taken the liberty to discount bought text links on high PR sites like statcounter

Oh, it will be automated, but just like many blackhat techniques you can't tell definitely sometimes without a human taking a peek. It would be likely that they would automate finding possible violators and then have a human manually review it to confirm it and if it is a false alarm let their algo people know so they can improve it.

Don't forget, Google manually reviews their SERPs so there is no reason why they wouldn't apply it here.

[ZigE]

The whole thing sounds weird, as Google itself makes money on paid links.

*that don't effect the relevancy of the search results

[Westech]

I wonder how this is going to affect the Yahoo Directory listings, since Yahoo accepts payment for inclusion.

[KLB]

I wonder how this is going to affect the Yahoo Directory listings, since Yahoo accepts payment for inclusion.

The thing is not all Yahoo directory listings are paid listings. I have several listings in Yahoo and never paid for any of them.