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Sphinn Home » Link Building
The Paid Link Farce is 3 Years Old - Get Your Act Together Google
Link Building News Source: http://www.blogstorm.co.uk
Published: Sep 30, 2008 - 03:10 am
Story Found By: DavidWallace 1232 Days ago
Category: Link Building
Patrick Altoft writes, "The thing that really upsets most webmasters isn’t the fact that Google has decided to force the whole nofollow paid links issue on the web. Most people, myself included, believe that Google has every right to make up whatever rules they think will make their search engine and company more useful and more profitable. If you want traffic from Google then you need to play by their rules, whatever they might be. No, the thing that really upsets webmasters and makes us angry on a daily basis is the way Google enforces those rules."
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Comments

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from Halfdeck 1231 Days ago #
Votes: 9

<div>Sidetracking a bit, but popularity based ranking algoes just don’t work, whether links are paid or unpaid. Here’s a similar problem on a micro level: look at crap going hot on Sphinn due to 1) submitter popularity 2) popularity of a blog 3) buddy voting 4) number of twitter followers 5) "newbie" topics with mass appeal (e.g. toolbar PageRank update). Popularity doesn’t always translate to quality.</div><div><div></div><div></div><div>Google’s algorithms substitute popularity for quality. Based on that flawed backend, Paris Hilton will outrank Beyonce every time. More importantly, unlike other "voting" systems (e.g. prez election, American idol, Dancing with the Stars), Google doesn’t restrict voting to any time bracket. If Google was used to elect the next prez and laws permitted Bush to run for the 3rd time, Bush would win and Obama would lose in a landslide because Google would not only count votes from this Nov but also votes from 2000 and 2004. That would be ridiculous, but guess what? That’s how Google ranks websites.</div><div></div><div></div><div>Matt Cutts’ advice (instead of going after big terms go niche or target less competitive verticals) is like saying "Hey Obama, you’re new. You can’t win the Nov election. Instead try becoming the senate majority leader since there’s less competition for that position." And while I appreciate Matt trying to see things from a webmaster’s perspective by running a blog, running a non-commercial blog and building a website that makes enough money to pay the monthly mortgage are two different animals.</div><div></div><div></div><div>Google can do much, much better. The devil is in the details though. It’s very easy to point out problems; the hard part is coming up with solutions that actually work.</div></div>

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from onreact 1231 Days ago #
Votes: 2

I have to disagree here with Patrick. This is a non-issue. If someone outranks you via paid links, just report him, if he’s not playing by the rules why should you lose? Also if you give me a budget of 50.000 (even $) I will create incentives for perfectly natural sustainable links that will make you rank for a year on top.I’ve worked one month with an agency that had this "link aquisition budgets" of several thousands Euros per client and then I left, for several reasons, but one of them was that this is stupid, you don’t need an SEO to buy links, a secretary with a PageRank checker could do it after an SEO training.In Germany I even outranked the spammers for years for one of the most popular pharmaceutical brands. With a budget like that you don’t need paid links. Back in the day when you had a client with a limited budget you could offer him some high PageRank links instead of SEO, now you can’t anymore, better for SEO experts, now there is work for you, real work and the secretaries can’t compete.

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from iBrian 1229 Days ago #
Votes: 0

Google have already done a heck of a lot to filter links - heck, the Google Sandbox started early in 2004, and Patrick misses that Google stopped the monthly PR updates to the toolbar in 2003 to help diminish the link economy.So the point of the post is kind of confused - it’s lacking context, and doesn’t seem aware of the changes Google have been making.Also, Onreact is quite right - link building has to be more creative these days.If there’s a problem, it’s not with Google - it’s with our need to re-educate people that digital marketing is absolutely not about "buying PR" and all about controlling presence and engaging communications with the wider web.

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from marketposition 1229 Days ago #
Votes: 0

Onreact, can you write a post on how to spot paid links? When I look at backlinks it is not always clear on what is paid, what is natural.

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