News Source: http://searchengineland.com
Published: Oct 07, 2007 - 06:00 pm
Story Found By: dannysullivan 1693 Days ago
Category: SEO
78 Comments
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News Source: http://searchengineland.com
Published: Oct 07, 2007 - 06:00 pm
Story Found By: dannysullivan 1693 Days ago
Category: SEO
78 Comments
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Comments
I don’t like it. Not one bit. This policy raises barriers to entry and creates a land mine type trap for the entrepreneurially inclined but technically uninformed. It is impossible for Google to enforce this policy evenly and fairly and it forces them into a catch as can behind the eight-ball mode.Of course it is Google’s search engine and they get to make the rules. It kind of reminds me of WWII slogans like "Loose Lips Sink Ships" and highway signs that encourage you to report litter bugs. As The Kinks sang on their very bestest song, "Parinoia the destroyer."
The Stanford Daily is a good example of this. In my Time For Google To Give Up The Fight Against Paid Links? post from earlier this year, I looked at how the student newspaper of Stanford University was continuing to sell links despite widespread attention to its actions and without any penalty being imposed by Google...Last week, I noticed the Stanford Daily had dropped from when I wrote the above in April to PR7 today.For the same reason, Google is only decreasing the PageRank for a subset of the sites they actually know about.Danny, do you think that the fact that SEL is so high profile, and the fact that you blogged about the Stanford Daily on there, had anything to do with them being one of the sites in the subset that got hit?
I think Google is taking an extremely naive view of the marketplace and is shooting themselves in the foot if they implement that on a truly even basis.Google is not a content creator. They are an aggregator. So, they may feel that people will put thousands of hours into creating good content out of the goodness of their heart. However, time is money. The internet will only continue to get better if it is financially viable. Before commercialism hit the web, it was cool, but not nearly as useful as it is now.Not every business model lends itself to selling a product. Some people don’t want to be directly selling a product - they sell ads, because it brings revenue to keep them being able to produce excellent content, and they know their visitors can differentiate between the two, unlike if they were directly hawking a product, which could taint their impartiality.Let’s also not forget that Google sells ads - that’s where nearly all of their revenue comes from. They can do whatever they want - it’s their business, but I’d like to think that they would care about all the people that have made them #1. Google’s results are the best because it has the best content. No financial incentive will have the same effect as communism did on Eastern Europe. It will leave the web a crumbling structure of outdated data for everyone who doesn’t start hawking their own products directly.
Danny,I suppose it really does all boil down to what you’ve said - if you care about doing well in Google, do what Google wants. I think the stress of this whole situation is that people, for the most part, are desperate to do well in Google, but are convinced that Google’s policies are senseless, unfair, unrealistic in the business world, and impossible to implement in a way by which we’d all stand and fall. I have heard a number of SEOs advocating migrating to ’some other search engine’, but as long as Google holds so many of the cards, nothing can beat its appeal and power. So, we are left with using Google as homebase and trying to run away from it at the same time. It’s an odd situation, but I think you summed it up really well in this article.Miriam
Not to mention link worthy....
Well, that makes the "no outing" movement even that much stronger, imo. When you combine these statements that Danny made in the article..."In addition, Google said that some sites that are selling links may indeed end up being dropped from its search engine or have penalties attached, to prevent them from ranking well."and"Google stressed, by the way, that the current set of PageRank decreases is not assigned completely automatically; the majority of these decreases happened after a human review."it becomes obvious that since:human review seems to be key, and outing would likely lead to human review, and the penalty can be as devastating as being dropped from the search engine...well...what more can i say. I’m now a card-carrying member of the No Outing Movement.I made a No Outing badge - feel free to grab it and use it - u can get it at www.seo-scoop.com/images/no-outing.png
"do you think that the fact that SEL is so high profile, and the fact that you blogged about the Stanford Daily on there, had anything to do with them being one of the sites in the subset that got hit?" Coincidence? Me thinks yes. I would love to see examples of other sites that are not in the limelight as much as Google’s Alma Mater. Why not make an example of the TL brokers/industry enablers themselves?Or would that be too hypocritical.
Why would there be a reason for this, really?Google sells links, it’s called AdWords, however, they don’t discount themselves for this practice... "don’t be evil" has a political tone to me now, more than ever! I contend that a link, paid, exchanged or whatever is good if it is for bringing targeted traffic to your website then do it. Why would Google penalize websites that are doing the same thing as Google, they are looking to provide their users with what they consider as relevant! Limit the value of the link, go ahead, but the link is there for a specific reason, targeted traffic. Limit the message to those that land on the page, don’t silence the messenger. I don’t discount a sports team because they have a sponsor listed on their jersey, car or scoreboard. I may chalk this up and discount the company... but I wouldn’t think any less of the team. Get really.Google needs to realize that they are not the only gig in town and make believe that others don’t exist because they are doing the same thing!
@mvandemar, the Stanford Daily has been known for selling links since at least 2005 and has been mentioned in publications other than Search Engine Land, including some mainstream ones, over the years. So no, I don’t think that’s one of the reason they got hit -- that I blogged about them in April. They got hit for being a long-time notable example of link selling. And all this does to them is drop their PR score. My guess is they won’t see a traffic drop, and Google no doubt was already blocking them from passing along link love before this. All the change means to them is people might be less likely to buy links from them (which isn’t a bad thing, if those links already weren’t passing credit but looked good with a PR9).@jill, we had a lawsuit on this one. It was SearchKing which had its PR dropped back in 2002, and Google won. They were found to have a constitutionally protect right to free speech that extended to PR score (and likely to their rankings0.@pitfall, AdWords don’t pass link credit, which is why Google doesn’t need to discount them. Similarly, it doesn’t have a problem with any links that are sold and delivered through JavaScript in a way that search engines won’t index them.
Danny, This still doesn’t address that they are penalizing a website for having outbound links. I mean, really, why don’t they just stop valuing links altogether?
So now instead of buying links to help a client outrank his competitors, an SEO can just out them with a spam report or a blog post and in a day or two, his client will rank #1. How convenient.Seriously though, what good is a TBPR drop if the buyers know that a TBPR 6 link is really as TBPR 7 link? And just because a site goes from 5 to 4 doesn’t mean people will stop buying. So I don’t see that as an effective deterrent. Banning a site will stop people from buying, but that I think is overkill.
"This still doesn’t address that they are penalizing a website for having outbound links."Pitfall, Google is NOT penalizing sites for having outbound links. Its penalizing sites for selling link juice to buyers who are out to rank higher on Google. There’s a difference.
So the stanford daily goes from a PR9 to a PR7....so what...the toolbar pagerank was never accurate anyways (the toolbar is fairy dust green)...and it doesn’t look like the stanford daily dropped any in rankings.....dropping it from a PR9 to a PR7 does what google wants anyways....now the price drops for the ads...but again....the stanford daily ranks just as it always did.....so does every other link selling PR9....now they’re 7’s...and ranking just the same....fairy dust folks.....one last FUD before they make it go away.[edited out long rant....voices in my head saying "must stay under the radar"..."must not piss off matt" ;)]
Halfdeck, so what you are saying is that if a link is not JavaScript based then it should be considered as earned? Link juice is a Google generated concept... He who giveth taketh more away?Really, links that are bought are not always to rank higher, I know, what a novel concept, a link for traffic, other than search crawlers? I would reccomend this to anyone, it just makes natural sense!My blog is about SEO and Internet marketing related information, so if I link to a website that is not related, is that a paid link? What about if I link to SEL, is that a paid link? Should there be any value passed to the unrelated website? Not really. Should the link to Search Engine Land have value passed, as a related website? Sure, right?It was Google that passed the value in the first place! What does it matter if one is paid and the other is not?
They have done a pretty thorough job, a large portion of the big PR7, 8 and 9 sellers have been hit. I don’t agree with the we will take away some sites rankings like Biz-Dir.co.uk but we will not take away other sites rankings like NewScientist.com part of it, that is not cool. They are basically confirming that the if you are a big site you can get away with what you want theory is correct.@Jim - I get them must not piss off Google voices to, I nearly didn’t post this.
"So now instead of buying links to help a client outrank his competitors, an SEO can just out them with a spam report or a blog post and in a day or two, his client will rank #1. How convenient."You say this like it is a bad thing or something new.For years responsible SEO consultants have been helping their clients through link work. There are two kinds of link work: offensive and defensive. Offensive involves getting high quality links pointing to your target website. Defensive involves getting good links pointing to your competitors’ sites removed. Defensive work as I practive it involves emails or snail mail letters to webmasters suggesting removal of links or pointing out that the site they are linking to might not be what they think. Also, letters to executives at search engines.Not only defensive links work good and effective practice; it is obligatory for an SEO consultant who has his or her client’s welfare in mind. The point is not to have more or better links; it is to have more and better links than the competitors.Now Google gives us an opportunity to report paid links. OF COURSE we will take advantage of this. It would be irresponisble not to. Incredibly, talk among Sphinn participants brands this activity under the prejorative term "ratting" like it is immoral. It is not only moral; it is required if you are keeping your client’s best interests in mind.It truly amazes me that such respected commenters as SugarRae and others criticize or pooh-pooh reporting of paid links. If you don’t report competitors who use paid links you might as well turn in your SEO card and go do something else. Rand Fishkin points out sites using paid links on his blog (that’s fair game for blogging), and astonishingly, he is criticized for doing so!
oh ok Google since you’re in a banning mood why not start hereSan Jose Mercury News - Pretty much a text book example of a link brothel in footer on that one Let’s see not only are they and adsense publisher (I bet a premium one too) but they are also in Google news. Where’s you quality standards on providing a good user experience on that one?So let’s review you’ll kill the "David Airey’s" and "john chow’s" of the world, in fact you’ll do such a number on them they won’t even rank for their site name, but San Jose Mercury News well that’s much too important a website to remove from the index, in fact we’d look down right foolish if you typed that into our search box and they didn’t come up. Go ahead Matt yank them out of the index the same way you did the other dastardly link sellers, or does Google have a two tiered system of justice, are you only willing to screw the little guy and sweep them under the carpet becasue no one will notice.
@me - I found an example of a very old resource site (an authority on a particular OS) that has been publicly referenced for selling links to poker sites (contextually irrelevant) and will keep an eye on their PR (it’s still a 9 :).
Reporting paid links for your own benefit is bad karma and not cool crimsongirl, a couple of my clients have done it without consulting me, nothing came of it. As for contacting sites that are linking to your competitors and gettng them to remove your competitors links, well that is just low (do that enough times and it will backfire).
Good post. I just wrote an article about that and how much confusion I think the whole issue really causes. It is a good point that if you don’t care what Google says or does, "sell links all you want". It was interesting to me when I contacted TLA about what their suggestions were. It was to send me to a blog post about the google payola and to tell me I can’t use rel=nofollow.The topic still sparks interest of course because google is google. Thanks.
Danny, you had written:Similarly, it doesn’t have a problem with any links that are sold and delivered through JavaScript in a way that search engines won’t index them.I wish you’d have added that in your original entry ;-). It’s quite an important distinction.MattLarson, you had suggested that people aren’t going to be "[putting] thousands of hours into creating good content out of the goodness of their heart." I disagree, at least if we look at those hours as being in the aggregate, and feel that the "well, it’s a commercial web and everything is for sale anyway!" argument to be both depressing and incorrect. People DO still create (and link to) outstanding content because they derive joy from doing so. We want MORE of that content created and accessible to our users.I totally understand and support tough-but-fair evaluation of our methods, but at the end of day, I’d hope the majority of folks here would agree with our goals of aiming for a more leval playing field on the web as well as a greater surfacing of quality content.
Excuse me for being a total noob, but does this mean that Google is going to lower the PageRank for www.google.com? And www.gmail.com? In fact, ever site with adsense, or any other google advertising program, is literally selling links.Or is it ok if you’re selling clicks but not links? How or why do they make that distinction?It seems it would be really easy for google to enforce this-- just add the text-link-ads domain to their workflow and drop the PR for any site that has links that go thru there.But it seems beyond asinine for google to penalize others for doing what google earns virtually all their money doing.
@Adam I am dropping all of my paid links for www.Biz-Dir.co.uk and I have nearly got rid of them all, when they are all gone will you let my directory start to rank for it’s name again? Is there anything else that could be causing the minus 40-50 ranking penalty?
@Adam - It doesn’t seem to be the case at all that a more level playing field is what you are after, otherwise you would treat everyone equally based on the quality of their content. Fundamentally there is no way google can know whether a linke is "sold" or not. Nor does this fact change the relevance of that link to the quality of the content linked to or the site. I don’t see how your policy can be anything other than an arbitrary attempt to slight your index based on prejudices about what you assume people who are "selling links" will do. Or put another way, every link in the world is sold. And every dollar google is earning right now comes from selling links.
Should I be facetious and ask why they’re only targeting those of us in Virginia? :pNah, best not ;)
Adam I have over 1800 pages indexed, and of those over 1500 are showing in the /* supposedly primary index.Among those pages are 9 pages from which I linked to clients who hired me to review their service or website. Those reviews typically took between 4 and 10+ hours to perform and write the content, to receive between $35 and $130 in my pocket, pre tax.The links I give are editorial, and are SEO friendly because that is my nature for all linking, and as I live in Europe, accessibility is always an issue.If the links I give are editorial, on topic, chosen by me, and I vouch for them, I shouldn’t need to stick nofollow on them, the same as you or Matt linking to Google wouldn’t use nofollow, and I go into considerable depth.If Google have done a manual review, then what probably happens the manual review would see the PayPerPost Direct badge in my sidebar.They are my payment processor, though it doesn’t allow me to edit the enquiry form. Lots of discussion happens in the background.Adam here are some quotes from you, in the interview on Stonetemplehttp://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-adam-lasnik.shtmlTwo, taking a step back, our goal is not to catch one hundred percent of paid links. It’s to try to address the egregious behavior of buying and selling the links that focus on the passing of PageRank. That type of behavior is a lot more readily identifiable then I think people give us credit for.That’s one of those things where typically you know it when you see it. As I mentioned, our interest isn’t in finding and taking care of a hundred percent of links that may or may not pass PageRank. But, as you point out relevance is definitely important and useful, and if you previously bought or sold a link without Nofollow, this is not the end of the world. We are looking for larger and more significant patterns.I should also point out that the very idea of buying a link from my blog for PageRank purposes would be naiive, as I don’t have nofollow on comments and trackbacks. My posts frequently have 40 or more comment links, so the amount of juice someone would gain from links within a review is minimal.What Google are now doing is flipping the public perception of what the green bar means on its head.The green bar is no longer an indication of quality of the site being accessed, it is purely for link buyers. That has been caused by Google in the last week.I do strongly support a level playing field, but you might need to examine employed status, and shareholder status in the quality of content people write, and the links they give.It seems like you are heavily discriminating against small freelancers.
Danny, thanks for the Official Google stance.
Just wish to mention that www.statcounter.com PageRank dropped from PR9 to PR8. This is the second time that the same site lose PageRank. Previously it was PR10.
@flux:But it seems beyond asinine for google to penalize others for doing what google earns virtually all their money doing.Yes, Google has text ads, paid links, and many appreciate that irony. But there is a key difference. The ads that Google sells do not help your rank better in Google’s organic / natural search listings. In contrast, many paid links are sold specifically to help people rank better.Just want to buy a link for the pure advertising value and the traffic from the link itself? Then buying a link with a nofollow on it should be a non-issue. Similarly, selling links with nofollow should be a non-issue.
Whatever Google does or does not do they may want to start by looking at their partners first. Something about "glass houses" comes to mind.@Danny - It also seems odd that Google wants the rest of the internet to bend its policies to make life easier for Google. Link ads began long before Google in plain old HTML. Forcing websites to js their "paid links" is BS.Especially since so many people don’t/won’t understand. So now you have plenty of great, quality sites getting penalized because of their methods of income. So won’t that eventually lead to Google’s results suffering? "Sorry but we had to ban them. I know they are the best site that talks about XYZ but they sold text ads!" Sounds kinda stupid to me.And then I look at Yahoo that keeps getting better reviews and they don’t seem to care if links are bought or not.Anyway, this debate is getting louder and I’m afraid it is helping Google’s cause more than anything. Despite our intentions we are accidently educating the masses about what to do/not do to rank in Google when it comes to paid links. And if we really want Google to let up that’s probably the last thing we want to do.
Andy, I believe all that matters to a Googler reviewer (who for all we know could be fresh out of college) is that you advertise PPP paid review services on your site. That’s enough for a reviewer to establish that you are allowing buyers to manipulate search results. A reviewer may not care how many hours you spent on a review, or whether or not your review is editorial. A reviewer may not even care that you disclose the fact that a review was paid for. No nofollow = non-compliance = manual penalty."I should also point out that the very idea of buying a link from my blog for PageRank purposes would be naiive"Good point, but no matter how minimal, PageRank does pass through your review links, and besides, there are more to links than just PageRank (trust/authority/contextual anchor text, etc)."I’d hope the majority of folks here would agree with our goals of aiming for a more leval playing field on the web as well as a greater surfacing of quality content."Adam, from dabbling in PPC, I know that there’s a discrepancy between what Google tells me and what actually happens when manual reviewers get involved. Google reviewers often make wrong judgement calls, because they don’t have a rule book that covers every situation and some may not even have adequate experience to make the right decisions.For example, according to a Googler, an adult landing page with the words "18+ legal teen" complies with Google’s teen concept policy, but a landing page with the words "barely legal" is non compliant. Ok... Both terms have nothing to do with child porn and they are clearly advertising porn with teens of legal age. Who decises these things? Clearly not the higher-ups in Google, since when I asked for a comprehensive list of compliant terms, Googlers refused to give me one. There is a small list posted in Google Adwords/help but the list only covers a minority of terms. Most of the trouble terms I banged into isn’t even listed there. So isn’t each reviewer making up his own list?In another case, an ad for a DVD download site, 100% legit, was rejected for promoting "cracks/hacking." Then a Googler later said he made a mistake and apologized for rejecting that ad.Finally, one of my other ads - that ran for over 6 months - was rejected after adding new keywords because the landing page had rotating images, and when reviewed, one of the images happened to show a 18+ teen. While Google rejected that ad, Google didn’t reject another ad promoting the same program by a different affiliate that was running at the time. How do you allow for that kind of inconsistency?Though I know AdWords and Search Quality are separate departments, it still goes to show that manual review invites bad judgement calls and inconsistencies in policy because you allow individual Googlers to write his own rule book without bothering to look at the bigger picture. Is that truely going to lead to a level playing field?If you really want a level playing field, you need to do something about new websites having a huge disadvantage against older sites with thousands of backlinks already in place. Do we all need to be as lucky and exceptional as YouTube or Myspace to rank for competitive terms?
@Matt / AdamWhat makes this Google lie so remarkable is that you guys knowingly strip EDITORIAL links then pay AdSense spammers to steal entire websites. And you both know it happens. And I know that you both know that. If I went fully public with a walkthrough example of how the process works would you guys still feel comfortable spewing all this fake ethics crap you are spewing right now?
Some people have made a lot of money selling links. Perhaps this business model has seen it’s day; at least with G? There seems to be just enough debate and question now to make link buyers wonder.
Come on, how about sites like seroundtable then? The guys from G visit regularly and they are clearly selling text links yet don’t suffer themselves (although I guess whoever is buying probably does). If you’re going to penalize, penalize all. Whilst Danny mentions the old lawsuit on this, a new one could probably be filed along the lines of "discrimination" if this really starts becoming the norm, especially if you’re not warned about a penalty. You do not have to have a paid product to still be held liable for discrimination.... I think shoemoney was right. Don’t make Google look bad...
From Danny, in the original piece:<blockquote>For the same reason, Google is only decreasing the PageRank for a subset of the sites they actually know about.</blockquote>From Adam Lasnick’s comment:<blockquote>but at the end of day, I’d hope the majority of folks here would agree with our goals of aiming for a more leval playing field on the web as well as a greater surfacing of quality content.</blockquote>I had a problem with the first quote upon reading it. How does G decide which sites to penalize and which ones to allow through? Appears to open Google up to all sorts of challenges ala SearchKing. But, coupled with Adam Lasnick’s comment, I’m really thrown for a loop.Adam, how can you have a level playing field when only a ssubset of sites is being penalized? You folks should consider having a bit of a sit down to make sure everybody’s on the same page.@SamIWas "If you’re going to penalize, penalize all." Definitely.
It’s Google’s search engine. They have every right to say that if you sell links, they might penalize you. Google is not telling people what to do with their sites, which is a popular argument point. Google is telling people what to do if they are concerned about doing better in Google. Don’t want to be harmed in Google? Don’t sell links. Don’t care about Google? Sell links all you want.Summarised perfectly. It amazes me that very intelligent SEOs continue to gripe when these three arguments seem so bloody obvious.
I think that’s definitely one of the contentious issues with Google’s decree; however, I do think that we often underestimate how much ’Mom and Pop’ link sellers know about such concepts as nofollow. With SEM being such a hyped arena at the moment, and so much information being freely available, I think we may be surprised at the level of knowledge outside profressional SEOs.
All this illustrates is Google’s utter despair about an essentially crappy, logically flawed ranking model - a contention I’ve had about PageRank from the very day they launched. And they know it, too.To all practical purposes, their link happy ranking is a dying elephant. But make no mistake: A wounded, dying elephant is arguably a lot more dangerous than an intact one - vide their trashing about left, right and center and forgot all logic, rhyme and reason. That’s what happens when you’re trying to cope with the Law of Unintended Consequences...Guess we’ll see boatloads of similar "collateral damage" happen in the near future before they either relent or finally go belly up.
Imagine how much sites can have problems with no evidence just becose G assume that they sell links for money.
excellent! my direct supervisor just sent this out on a staff email.. (i had her sub to your rss)..subject : in case a client asks...body: we have never done link trades or bought links or anything with our SEO outside of valid links included with media buys, (usually in a magazine that gives us links from their website for free), or yahoo! directory submissions on category sponsorships....(the rest omitted)...again.. we go back to old school SEO.. (content is king, frequent updates are required and code should be clean and provide a "unique topical resource for the search engine"?)p.s. follow up on your old story..http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGIH_enUS210US210&q=Pontiac+dealers+dallas%2dft%2eworth
Confirmed, once of my sites (www.csselite.com) was in Rand’s article on paid links last week. Whether or not this is how google noticed that I’m selling paid links, I’m not sure, but my PR is down from 6 to 5.
I can’t seem but sense that there could be 2 types of treatments here. Google allowing certain sites, like those from newspapers to freely send out links accompanied with link juice. And if they are manually working through devaluaing value...that is an enormous amount of manual effort to degrade the value of sum total of millions of ads from so many newpapers in so many locations. Those same newspapers can provide editorial comment and links withn content that are helpful.I checked washingtonpost.com for 2 paid links to 2 different advitisors who similarly rank well for 2 logical search phrases for their services in topics of great dollar value to them. Both sites had 1st page rankings for the important money pages.Is google treating different kinds of pages differently? Is google treating "partners" differently? Putting the onus of "outing" websites on webmasters is doubly sneaky if in fact there are millions of ads passing linkjuice from certain types of sites.It makes me terribly unhappy with this google treatment. If they have an enormous problem with selling links...then automate some system to tackle the problem. Don’t lay it on webmasters.
Adam, no offense intended, but when you say "I totally understand and support tough-but-fair evaluation of our methods, but at the end of day, I’d hope the majority of folks here would agree with our goals of aiming for a more leval playing field on the web as well as a greater surfacing of quality content." it is extremely belittling imho. The whole we hope you agree with us thing did use to work, but there’s been too many curveballs for that to sit very well nowadays. How can you randomly penalize sites but not others for doing EXACTLY the SAME thing and in the same breath talk about levelling the playing field. We know it, you know it, everyone that reads this knows it, it is not possible {period}Either penalize them all, or don’t penalize any or make it clear what will or won’t get you penalized. You’re opening up the company to a bucketload of legal action, not to mention the fact that several quality resources have already been penalized and thus the relevancy of Google results has started to slide . An example, although I wouldn’t call it a quality site, is that you can’t find John Chow when you search for him by name; for the average surfer that means Google can’t find the dudes website which makes you guys look incredibly incompetent.
It’s crap like this that makes me want to start posting to Gevil.org again.I guess I’m actually almost relieved that they’ve done this. The more stupid **** like this they pull, the more people will realize just how jacked up Google really is. They’ve had a "screw the little guys" mentality with AdSense for years and now it’s spilling over into their SERPs and everything else.
@ Adam, small pet pieve; when there’s still 3 outstanding answers due by googlers by the end of the day in the popular picks thread, wouldn’t this kind of information make for a really useful post in oh let’s say those same google webmaster groups?? I have nothing against Danny, but if you want people to really sit up and listen and make this information official, it should be coming out of Google. Danny hasn’t started working for you *yet*, has he? :)
Damn, I linked to gevil.com and not gevil.org in my post at the weekend - you always have to check those links.
If everyone gets paranoid about linking out (incase it could be seen as a sold link) and stops linking out, how will google rank sites then?
In terms of lawsuits: Doesn’t the fact that Google US is currently being sued by the ACCC, make this whole paid-links issue, a hypocritical farce? see article: Sydney Morning Herald - October 04, 2007 This is an update from the previous lawsuit where the ACCC was going after Google AU. They have switched tack and are now aggressively going after Google US. "Google was therefore misleading customers because it claimed to rank search results based on relevance, not the money it received from advertisers." Isn’t that exactly what paid-link advertisers are being accused of? Manipulating results. What is getting up every’s nose is not that Google is targeting paid links, but that they are targeting paid links whilst conducting a paid link advertising scheme of far greater magnitude than anyone else, that doesn’t practice what they preach. I hope Google lose that case in a big way. It might make them realise that they are beginning to resemble the "unethical" nature of big companies like Microsoft. Do as we say, not as we do.
@Danny:The ads that Google sells do not help your rank better in Google’s organic / natural search listings. In contrast, many paid links are sold specifically to help people rank better.... link with a nofollow on it should be a non-issueOh. My. God. So google now has a mind reader? And to avoid being unfairly represented by google, we have to use a non-standard, google specific tag? Google is the one that determines page rank- and so you can choose how page rank is affected by inbound links all you want. IF you were doing that, and doing it objectively, nobody would have a problem with it.The problem is that you are claiming to read peoples minds and know their intent, and applying your changes inconsistently. And that is evil. You can’t represent yourself as acting in the interests of qualtiy while giving large sites a pass. Nofollow is a bad idea- if someone forgets it, you penalize them. What it means, nobody really knows because nobody really knows your algorithm. And further, its not part of the web, its google specific tag.The reality is, links, all links, are legitimate. IF you want to adjust your page rank alogrithsm based on the way certain sites smell- that’s your right, and you’re free to do so. But the more you go down this path of reading peoples minds and penalizing sites arbitrarily, the more you open yourself up to being gamed.... and the more you are getting gamed. I think its particularly asinine to tell me to use the nofollow tag when I link to a friends website, lest I risk being punished by you. You create a situation where the only safe thing is to use no-follow, and thus you detroy the very foundation upon which your entire search engine is built.And finally, simply acknowledgign the hypocrisy of selling links while punishing others who sell links based on your ability to read their minds and know their intent, does not remove the hypocrisy.Don’t be evil.
Ok, this has been tough for me...I have always thought of google as a company that dealt with things fairly, but since they are the size they are and they seem clearly bent on escalating an "arms race" which can inevitably only result in lower quality search results--- I’m not going to fight them. Their employees don’t even seem to understand the problem.So, this is my decision. All links on sites run by the software I’m writing will have "nofollow" on them. Its not worth risking the pentalty for having a bad link. And hey, the unauthoritative opinionsite wikipedia gets great ranking by hogging all the pagerank juice by always having nofollow for outbound links. (Talk about black hat SEO-- genuinely authoritative sites, referenced by wikipedia, don’t get the juice and so wikiepedia is higher on the SERP.)
What is the problem with selling links? If someone wants to advertise on your site must they use adsense or be penalised?
Well done Danny in raising this issue.Your actions have resulted in the Stanford Daily page rank falling...hooray...perhaps you should turn your attentions to ending wars or feeding the third world.Pathetic...
It’s a good idea, but let’s end users may misinterpret the red bar and associate it with malware.It’s really great that Google really acts on paid links, at least those sold for the sole purpose of improving organic rankings. Now I wonder if they will also effectively penalize buyers.
I am confused about something. Matt Cutts has been noted as saying that if you label the links as "paid" or "sponsored" that you are clearly stating that it is paid advertising and that you are ok. The Stanford Daily clearly has their links in the footer of the homepage labaled as "PAID ADVERTISING". Yet they have been cited for breaking the rules and have thus been docked 2 PR points in this recent update.So is this a penalty that has now been imposed or has Google devalued links across the index and thus those links now pass on a lower PR score to the Stanford Daily and thus its own PR is now lower?By the way, what ever happend to Google explicitly denying performing hand jobs on sites? Yikes!
Danny,I, like many others, have huge respect for your unbiased and well-informed views, but your take on Google in this article strikes me as one-sided."It’s Google’s search engine... Google is not telling people what to do with their sites... Don’t care about Google? Sell links all you want."Yes, it’s their search engine, but not their traffic. People will want to look for medical info, shop for products, get the latest news regardless of Google. All the informational need, all the shopping intent, all the socializing urge exists regardless of Google.That is, the traffic you, I or anybody receives from Google is not "free traffic courtesy of Google". It’s not something they produced, and then handed over to us as some generous gift. This is one of the most insidious misconceptions regarding Google that happily goes around unnoticed and un-dissected. Even in Search Engine Land, unfortunately.That is pre-existing traffic/intent looking for the services, products, knowledge or news you or I offer. Google only gets to aggregate and re-route it according to its own taste.They aggregate it through a strong service, but increasingly also through a formidable brand name and near-ubiquity.I cannot afford not to care for Google, because a large part of the traffic that is "looking for me" goes through them. Most websites cannot afford not to care, for the same reason.So Google actually is telling me what to do with my website, simply because it has "hijacked" a part of "my" traffic, so it can blackmail me. (I have put "hijacked" in quotes, because obviously, the way they do it is neither illegal or unethical, but I have deliberately not put "blackmail" in quotes in the same sentence, because that’s where what their actions do begin to look just that - illegal and unethical.)As long as it penalizes websites by taking away their ranking-juice passing abilities, Google can argue that it is simply increasing the quality of its product (the SERP) by restoring relevancy. As soon as it starts to take away rankings wholesale from sites, it is actually decreasing the quality of its own product by harming its relevancy.When you begin to punish entities even at the price of hurting yourself, that’s something very similar to mindless vengeance. It’s unethical. And if those entities have not done anything illegal, then it can be argued that punishing them becomes illegal. Which is exactly what Google is doing.Do you or anybody really find it a healthy development that a hundred-billion dollar corporation increasingly displays a vindictive streak, and gets to threaten other market players based on the enormous market power it enjoys?
What a load of crap! Many of us sell advertising in order to cover our overhead costs (servers, staff, web design, etc), and now Google is going to penalize people selling links? It just doesn’t seem right, now does it?And how about that PageRank update, is it EVER going to happen? We’re going on 6 months here already!!
First, I like Google, so keep that in mind...Google is being STUPID. They have inflated the value of links and now they are saying they are the only ones that can use that value?In the past, anything that could be manipulated for rankings has been taken away. Hidden text, keyword stuffing, and other crap was taken away when it was found to be abused. Now we have had link abuse for how many years, and Google makes this sad attempt to control it? What about 3-way link exchanges and other ways that people use? Even if you take paid links out of the equasion, you are still going to have widespread about. So why not just reduce the value of linking so that it is not practical to abuse it? Then we could all go back to being more concerned about CONTENT and not this bogus linking stuff.Ok, that may not happen, so Google better be damn careful about slapping sites that they think have paid links. I could see a huge class action lawsuit appear over that. The simple truth is that all they are going to do is drive the linking underground. It’s NOT GOING TO GO AWAY. I thought you guys in the ’Plex were smart? There’s too much money at stake.Now, if Google CAN tell what links are paid and which are not, can’t they just FILTER the PR from those paid links? Then the site keeps it’s PR, which we assume it should, and the bad people that paid for links get no benefit (As if they will be able to feaking tell if it’s a problem with their links or a problem with their site...!I just can’t get over that Google is telling all site owners that they can’t have paid advertising links on their site. They are starting to remind me of Microsoft!
@Danny You said:"Yes, Google has text ads, paid links, and many appreciate that irony. But there is a key difference. The ads that Google sells do not help your rank better in Google’s organic / natural search listings. In contrast, many paid links are sold specifically to help people rank better."Isn’t this just smoke and mirrors? Take a look at the TLA example. They rank ~56th for the phrase Text Link ads.However, they sit in the #2 Sponsored spot above all the organic listings.What sort of message is Google trying to send? Oh it’s not ok for you to rank organically, but we will happily take your money and rank you inorganically above every other organic listing.So, TLA circumvents the penalty by paying Google money. That is tantamount to blackmail and stating that it is ok for Google to do that, is preposterous.If Google was really serious about paid-link advertising, they would get rid of their NIMBY (not in my back yard) attitude and clean up their own dodgy advertising (which they are being sued over) before pointing the finger at anyone else.define:google = hypocrite
@bsaric: I am wondering the same thing, as it appears that as somebody already mentioned, there does not appear to be a book of guidelines that reviewers will follow ..If a jury of 12 can sometimes wrongfully convict, imagine what the margin of err increases to with a jury of 1? Interesting times ahead for sure ...
I have actually another caught adword ad pictures on one of my site. If google cutting paid links then why this ad? don’t think advertiser will buy a link for just a no-follow attribute in them
Would make more sense for google to just drop the page ranking. How many links in a site has is a very poor measure of quality and should have nothing to do with how a site ranks. Time to admit that it was a huge mistake to put this in the algo and dump it.
@flux: I’m not sure if you’re mad at me or Google. In case it is me, I’m not telling you to use nofollow. I’m telling you to use it if you’re concerned about your rankings and/or PageRank value with Google and want to sell links. If you don’t care about those things, you don’t have to use nofollow. More power to you. But be aware that if you fail to do this, or fail to disable link credit from flowing thorugh links that Google deems to be paid, you might get hit with a penalty. I’ve actually argued in my other article (that was mentioned in this one) that I’d like Google to give link credit to links that deserve credit, regardless of their paid status. But what I and you might wish for isn’t the reality with Google right now. I can only tell you the situation now and for those who are concerned about penalties, what to do.@markwilson: No, the Standford Daily is responsible for having their PageRank value dropped, not me. I don’t control that site or their actions. They were outed not by me but by others back in 2005 and have continually been cited as an example over the years. In 2006, they said they were no longer going to sell paid links. They went back to that. Moreover, they’re selling links that almost certainly haven’t passed any link juice for months if not years. So if the PageRank drop means some people don’t buy links that were useless for gaining ranking credit, that’s a good thing for the people who were going to waste their money.@sendtraffic: Good point, except I believe Matt tries to argue that good disclosure means machine readable disclosure, so that Google can automatically detect these. Not everyone, fair to say, buys into that.@sza: Sorry if you felt it was one-sided, but I’ve pretty much said the same thing for years. Google can and will (as any search engine can and will) do what it wants. Indeed, in the case of PageRank decreases, we’ve even had the SearchKing case have a US court uphold this right. Google is like a newspaper that will print what it wants. Nor would I agree it is "my" traffic. People went to Google -- not to me. At worst, I would be upset that Google might be somehow "hijacking" "my" traffic if someone searched for my site by name and couldn’t find it. That’s in particular because even Google knows that while people came to them, those peopel came expecting to find the "correct" site, and penalties that prevent sites for ranking for their own names really, really suck. Text Links Ads should be back in for their own name. But for generic terms or general traffic? Harder to support that, in my view.@djensen: I agree about the mixed messages. I showed an example of this at the end of my article, about what’s not right for organic listings is perfectly fine when it comes to ads.
@danny: Do you really believe that Google can "do what it wants"? Have we learned nothing from the Digg "HD-DVD Processing Key" censorship? Would it really be that difficult for the blogosphere to *take back* their search engine? A weekly Friday "don’t use Google" day perhaps? How about a "nogoogle" plugin for Firefox? Google might think they are all powerful, but the people are the ones giving it to them, and they can easily take it away.Watch Google change their minds when their share price slips a couple of points once word spreads of a massive revolt against the engine. Money talks BS walks! It’s almost inevitable given how many legitimate/honest and hard-working bloggers, SEOs and webmasters are being penalised - many of whom are well known and who would love nothing more than to see the grin wiped from Google’s face.Once a movement like that starts, how are they going to stop it?
"Once a movement like that starts, how are they going to stop it?"It’s never going to start.People are afraid of installing user-agent:googlebot disallow:/ on their domains because they’re addicted to Google traffic or their hopes of what Google will send them in the future.Let’s see how many brave webmasters are willing to stop Google from scraping their sites.
I actually did an entire month of Google Free Friday back in July. They’re still standing.Look, how about this. Everyone who is so spitting mad that Google has somehow dictated how they can operate and is the most evilest vilest thing should do two things:Block Google with robots.txt, as Halfdeck suggestsStop searching with GoogleWake me when anyone actually does number one. Seriously, I’m not trying to be a Google cheerleader. I find the paid link debate tiresome, with the same arguments we’ve had for years still going but revived because Google itself launched this second paid links war. I wish they’d just get over the paid links issue, right?But this sense of entitlement is also tiring. Even before Google, I was writing that search engines don’t somehow owe site owners a living. You are not entitled to search engine traffic any more than you’re entitled to have good newspaper articles written about you. Yes, search engines can, do and have done whatever they want within legal limits. Those legal limits, by the way, have upheld Google’s right to degrade PageRank for sites.The people could indeed easily take away Google’s power, but they don’t because despite all the many things people feel Google does wrong, they do a lot of right. They help us find things easily, quickly and efficiently. They send site owners huge amounts of traffic for free -- huge amounts.All those legitimate and honest and hard working bloggers? The vast majority of them are sucking up the free Google traffic handed out.I suppose if you really wanted to mess with Google, you could push for a month of all nofollow on links, get everyone to do it.But here’s the thing. I understand the arguments and the inconsistencies that Google shows. But you also aren’t going to find mass web support for the notion that site owners should be able to sell links to other sites that just want to rank better.Think about it. It’s really easy to make Google look bad right now if you argue things like:Google is robbing sites of moneyGoogle is telling sites what to doGoogle is trying to control the webGoogle is so bad it needs site owners to police linksDo all that, and sure, you’re going to win some people over. But then remember that other people are going to raise the entire evil SEOs argument. You do recall SEOs don’t really have a shining reputation across the web, right? We’re seen as blog spamming scum suckers. And then it’s explained that:Google is not preventing links from being sold; it’s only asking that paid links use nofollow as a way to prevent pollution of search resultsSite owners should have no problem with nofollow if people just want links for trafficSite owners complaining about nofollow are doing so because they know lots of people want links just to game the search enginesGoogle thinks votes (ie links) should be earned, not boughtAgain, I understand the nuances and inconsistencies. I’ve written at length about them. But most people don’t. Most people are going to see this ultimately as a bunch of SEOs trying to game the search results they depend on. And that means you shouldn’t expect some web rebellion to rise up.
Excuse me while I go get the entire previous post tattooed on my back, or at the very least, this bit:"But this sense of entitlement is also tiring."There is little doubt that Google are doing some things wrong. In particular, it’s the fact that they’ve been (relatively) quiet on a rule for a fair old while, and now they’re railing against it and expecting everyone to step into line immediately.For me, an analogy would be 100 metres sprint rules. Imagine if in the past, the IAAF had been quiet on the use of steroids. Athletes who could afford to do so took all the THG they wanted and broke records on a weekly basis. Meanwhile, athletes who were just as fast, but couldn’t get that extra push were eliminated in the qualifiers. Suddenly, the IAAF came along and ruled that THG was wrong and anyone using it would suspended for a couple of years. Some athletes (*cough*Marion Jones*cough*) continued to use it due to it being their "right" and the IAAF had no jurisdiction to impose rules on all sports. Goo... The IAAF detected those using pai... THG and bam, they were disqualifed (or sent to play baseball or something). The IAAF couldn’t care less if the cheating athletes went elsewhere, but they wanted to clean up their sport. They did it wrong in that they suddenly became outspoken on a method that so many sprinters had been using, but its their sport and therefore their right to change the rules.It could be argued that the sprint lessened in quality due to the times dropping, but nevertheless, at least it’s a level playing field and ultimately, quality will out.And yes, I recognise that I may get pulled on the IAAF rather than other athletes testing urine, but so be it.This anaology has been brought to you by Long and Protracted Similes inc.
@dannysullivanYou say you’d be upset if you couldn’t be found for your own name. This is exactly what I was talking about, and this is what is happening to a lot of sites.True, for generic keywords, everything is subjective. I’m not arguing that thisandthatwebsite.com has a birthright for the #1 position of, say, the keyword "mesothelioma". But it does have a birthright for the #1 position when people search for "thisandthatwebsite.com".Because when it comes to one’s own unique name, the whole thing suddenly becomes objective. And here’s a very important line Google crossed with its penalties. It’s the line between "we improve our search service by discounting manipulation" and "we don’t even care about hurting our own relevancy as long as in the process we can break the neck of somebody we don’t like".That’s why I was talking about a vindictive streak. And it doesn’t just "suck", as you put it. It’s unethical at the least.And I find it ominous that the penalties Google imposes on sites grow ever tougher, while the criteria for doing so become ever murkier, with an increasing danger for being unfairly punished. (’Cos it cannot really get any more error-prone than with paid link detection...)
The real question of course is how to tell if your site has been penalized. It doesn’t appear that it’s entirely obvious. Ultimately how can you tell if Google has decided to penalize you?
Sphunn, Danny to give u your first century :)
This is no surprise. I have sat in the "paid links are evil" at SES and cringed as search engine marketers (in my words not theirs as I cannot recall their exact words) told Matt Cutts to get over it paid links were here to stay and move on to something else. Matt Cutts with his usual grace and style calmly told them and the audience again and again that this was coming. I never agreed with this session running in the first place it was sheer defiance and one person even suggested if they were serious to ban the biggest seller of links. They did. Its hard for people to accept that Google can exert this much power and affect their livelihood but reality is they can and they do. The biggest issue for me now is that Matt and his spam team needs to talk to the Adwords team and create a consistent approach to this issue. Its sheer hypocrisy to allow the site they banned for selling text link ads to pay to sell the service on Adwords, plus the dozens of other sites doing the same thing. This in my opinion is just wrong and there is now a huge credibility gap in Google’s approach. For the sake of the adverse PR this is going to create they need to formulate a cohesive approach and back Matt up or they are going to have to take the fall out.
I think it’s one thing to devalue the links themselves, but really wrong to penalize a site for selling links. There are perfectly legitimate reasons to purchase links outside of trying to artifically inflate authority. I actually drive converting traffic to my site through some of my link placements. If I purchase a link to drive traffic to my site and Google wants to devalue it to keep the search results relevant-- that’s totally under their discretion-- but to create a policy that inhibits free market exchange of website advertising is totally overstepping their bounds. And no coincidence that Google is themselves an outlet for advertisement. No doubt they’d like to have the monopoly on paid endorsements for websites. You can say that it’s Google’s search engine and they can do as they please, but considering that their search engine controls 2/3’s of the traffic on the internet, they truly are in the position of being able to dictate website design and practice. If you don’t do it their way, you lose. They have an obligation to not abuse that power.
I’ve been in a closet lately, heavily immersed in some projects. As such, I have not kept abreast with the whole selling links issue (nor many other common SEO debates). For me, all the focus has been on developing high-quality websites and great content for those that I personally run.Well this week Google has pretty much smacked me in the face for all the effort. I have sold a couple dozen links over the last few years--but those few links are always targeted by a customer on a specific page. Out of thousands of pages on my sites, there are only a couple dozen links that were there as a result of a sale. I have no fear of being honest about that--as long as a customer isn’t selling something unethical... why should anyone be afraid of selling them a link?Well it looks like Google feels differently than I do. My onetime PR6 site has now dropped to a PR2 (though the PR was more recently a 4-5 through this year).http://www.shawnolson.net/a/1383/google-page-rank-woes.htmlI agree with most of Google’s motive behind this. But as someone who always keeps high standards in mind, I feel that their efforts are misdirected.
I see the Stanford website has now dropped to a PR5that sums it up
THIS POST IS NOT ACCURATE!Here is the official policy:http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66736Google will only penalize sites that try to pass of paid links as valid links. Its not aconspiracy by Google to drive out competition, its an effort to maintain fair and accurate page rank.Any site can sell links as long as they follow these rules (from link above):Adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to the tagRedirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt fileThis is not hard to do.THIS POST IS NOT ACCURATE!
I’ll go back and make it clearer, but I think it was understood by many that when I was writing about paid links and the penalties that Google is indeed applying, this was for paid links that pass link credit.
Had exactly this issue myself on this week, started the text-ad programme a week or so ago, sold one link and then this week THREE of my top keywords/phrases dropped from google altogether. I removed the programme from my site and this week I’m starting to climb slowly again. It angers me to the core, although at the end of the day there’s no getting away from the fact that it’s google’s business and they have the right to say who does what if they want top rankings.Definately food for thoughtMark
The Stanford Daily just moved daily.stanford.edu to stanforddaily.com (Sept. 16,2008). Their rate card, effective 7/1/2008 (when it was still on the .edu domain), has a basic text link ad at $150 a month. When Danny wrote this a year ago, the price was $350 a month.
This sucks for Patrick Gavin