Calendar
Network
Feeds
- 32
- Sphinn It!
Went Hot: October 30, 2007 - 10:38 am
Posted By: AndyBeard 615 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.carlocab.com)
Category: Google SEO
Takeaway: It is advertising, nofollow is for comment spam
5 Comments
Comments
He's wrong and Patrick is right, essentially. Nofollow IS for spam. Google is completely off base with this one.
I agree, but I have made a point to highlight news form the major stakeholders in all my coverage. This is the first official or semi official coverage from one of the advertising channels affected.
It is certainly more reliable than the "reports" coming out of Google because there are actual words that certainly sound like what Patrick wrote them.
"Nofollow IS for spam."
Some paid links are spam. Some paid links are quality, editorial links. Can Google tell the difference?
"It’s just that if they don’t put the nofollow tag on the ads I’ll stop using their service"
Having said that, it would be idiotic for TLA to allow nofollow on their links. Sellers have two options: remove their TLAs, or don't. Nofollowing TLAs is not an option. Link juice is a part of the package.
Drop in TBPR is only cosmetic; I see no reason for removing TLAs.
If link juice is part of the TLA package, but leaving up TLA ads lowers the TBPR score, how logical is it to keep TLA if the PR score lake has dried up? (just asking...taking into consideration TBPR is more broom-stick mythology than an accurate score.)
In other words, for those who buy based on that score, if there's nothing worthwhile to buy, why keep up the ads?
For those who buy TLA ads just to be on sites that have traffic and who were ignoring the PR score, how could Google know the difference?
"In other words, for those who buy based on that score, if there's nothing worthwhile to buy, why keep up the ads?"
Kim, because Google hasn't reduced the real internal PageRank of a penalized page. If PageRank was reduced, index penetration level would decrease (in Andy Beard's case, it didn't - he's still 90% non-supplemental) and thus traffic level would decrease (less pages in the main index = less overall Google traffic, in general).
Maybe the links don't pass value anymore, now that Google is claiming they've detected paid links on a site. But then again, many TLAs are so blatant we can never say for certain they passed any value to begin with.
One way buyers might measure the effectiveness of an active paid link is by keeping an eye on their ranking for specific anchor text a paid link is targeting (e.g. [search engine optimization]). If they haven't lost rank, then assume a paid link is still working. You don't need the toolbar to figure this out.
"For those who buy TLA ads just to be on sites that have traffic and who were ignoring the PR score, how could Google know the difference?"
Google will assume PageRank is part of the package any time it sees a paid link that is not nofollowed, even if a buyer in fact has no interest in improving his ranking.
In those cases, you can make arrangemenets directly with advertisers instead of going through TLA for a nofollowed traffic link and get 100% of the monthly revenue instead of splitting 50/50 with a link broker.
John Scott, for example, I believe deals directly with SEG. His reason for paying for links on SEG is that though SEG doesn't send him a bucketload of monthly traffic, the traffic they do send converts extremely well.