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Avatar Went Hot: January 1, 2008 - 11:56 am
Posted By: vangogh 248 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://searchengineland.com)
Category: Link Building
The paid links debate is back, this time about whether Google wants all links in a paid post to have a nofollow attribute. Below, a look at the latest round, plus a recap of this year's "War On Paid Links" by Google and where the other search engines stand on the subject.
6 Comments     

Comments

from BogglesMyMind 248 days ago #
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hey thanks Vanessa for the t-awesome quote from ask.com on this subject.  If only the other search engines would adopt this philosophy we could go on with our lives.

from pcunix 248 days ago #
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I'd like to know how any search engine is supposed to distinguish quality.

I've taken the extreme step of adding "nofollow" to every outgoing link..  overreacting? Maybe, but I think I have good reason to do so: More thoughts on the Google Slap, no follow  and a Slap Back

For example, I have a large "Unix/Linux Consultants List".  It's as white-hat as you can get:  I don't charge for the listing, and the people who do list there are definitely organically relevant to my site's content (unixy stuff).   But there is no way Google is going to see that as anything but a ,ong list of links, and they don't know I'm not charging, and they don't know the people who submitted there aren't looking for link-love - so I have to add "nofollow" - which is very unfair to those people because they legitimately are organic links!

from vangogh 248 days ago #
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What message are you sending by adding nofollow to every outgoing link? To me that says you don't trust any outgoing link, in which case why link to them. If you consider a good portion of your content untrustworthy how should a search engine see that same content?

I'm not suggesting adding all the nofollows is wrong. Just trying to raise some questions.

from robwatts 247 days ago #
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Weird -  I received a trackback on this but no mention in the piece itself....anyway, moving on, nice recap of what will continue to be a thorny and contentious topic.

Google has become the dog, content providers and webmasters are now the tail. That's quite an achievement really.

Happy New Year!

from wheel 247 days ago #
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Excellent review and summary; well worth the read.

from emom 245 days ago #
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So basically, Matt Cutts would prefer us to nofollow all links on any page that has sponsored content.

But let's look at EVERY content management system out there - especially blogs (including their own Blogger). We would have to nofollow our entire sidebar in order to be compliant with his recommendation. The sidebar appears on other pages with no sponsored content, but because the sidebar is the same on the pages with sponsored content, we would be damned if we did, and damned if we didn't.

I'm especially pleased to see Ask taking a stand on the side of users, in direct opposition of Google on this whole paid links scandal. I removed 4 extremely relevant paid links from my site two months ago, yet still have yet to see my PR returned to the level it used to be. I've always been hyper-picky about which advertisers I allowed on my site in the first place, I'm glad that Ask won't penalize me for showing relevant and valuable ads to my readers.


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