Google - Buying links will cost you

[HarleyDude]

I thought my friends at DNF might find this interesting:

Buying links to your site on more popular and/or related sites is becoming part of many people’s promotion plan. Late last night Matt Cutts, Software Engineer at Google, posted a very interesting and ominous answer on his blog to a link buyer’s question (the emphasis is mine):

Q: “If one were to offer to sell space on their site (or consider purchasing it on another), would it be a good idea to offer to add a NOFOLLOW tag so to generate the traffic from the advertisement, but not have the appearance of artificial PR manipulation through purchasing of links?”
A: Yes, if you sell links, you should mark them with the nofollow tag. Not doing so can affect your reputation in Google.

I’m not sure what this really means, but I wonder exactly how the GoogleBot is going to tell a paid link from a non-paid link (except that Google wants the paid ad to have a NOFOLLOW tag, which I have actually seen in pagecode).

I have come to the conclusion that PageRank is overrated anyway, and while I understand that Google values organic popularity, it should be spending more time weeding out the Googlebait sites that manage to rank higher than real sites. Instead it is punishing those with successful sites who want to sell advertising that helps people’s PR.

I do chuckle at the fact that Google is becoming a market unto itself — it makes rules and the market finds ways around them, so it changes the rules again.

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From AffiliateBlog

[JMJ]

I agree and have come to the same conclusion long ago. One minute the way to go is link popularity so you spend months doing just that. Then the rules are changed and all of that work hurts you. Another thing I noticed is if you change the mapping of your site you might aswell forget about google sending any traffic to the thousands of old links indexed in. I changed the script running one of mine and it dropped my traffic 75% in a matter of no time.

While I do understand they have the burden of battling the manipulators the changes they make cause big problems for those who would love to stay as they are. They use to be pretty small time webmaster friendly now it takes a search engine scientist to keep up.

[HarleyDude]

Couldn't have said it better myself.

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AffiliateBlog

[NosajiX]

buy you guys are right on. google is becoming like an unpleasable wife!

BTW, has any one noticed how easy it is to get to the top of msn lately?

[Darkhorse]

BTW, has any one noticed how easy it is to get to the top of msn lately?

I have only noticed an increase in traffic from MSN in the last few months, while not as productive as google the traffic is good.

[khuldun]

Yes msn has become a higher source of traffic for me and i get listed there as soon as i register my domain

[indemand]

Who'd have thought I'd be rooting for Microsft?

Hopefully MSN's traffic will go even higher when Vista is released.

[j8jweb]

Any truly well-versed SEO expert (about 20 worldwide or thereabouts, the likes of Claus comes to mind, maybe even Shak, or some of the more famous guys like Jill Whalen or Danny Sullivan) will tell you that selling links is fine. Google cannot tell unless you are very overt about it, and even then will not penalise you except in exceptional circumstances. Don't buy links in a panic, either. I've seen so many instances of people buying supposed high PR links when they have no knowledge of how PR works.

In my honest opinion though, every time PR is mentioned... I just wonder where some people have been the past 5 years. Things have moved on since PR days... a lot.

[denny007]

One way links (to yourselves) can NOT hurt. Simply because if they could, you could destroy your competitors by organizing linking to them from "bad" pages.

[BidNo]

Yeah, I'm not happy with Google either; they're full of themselves. "Google arrogance" has replaced "do no evil".

I actually have one permenant redirect listed (i.e. findable via searchable) yet the site is not. Everything is listed fine in MSN and Yahoo. Go figure!

Tech support is worthless. They've replaced any real knowledge with skills in the brush-off.

I've changed my search habits. Screw them! Go Microsoft (and Yahoo)!!!

Cheers,
BidNo

[Tia Wood]

BTW, has any one noticed how easy it is to get to the top of msn lately?

Yes!

[Rarethings]

Either google is going back to the drawing board with their policies, or they are going to lost a lot fans.

[POLiSH]

White HAT SEO is the way to go.

[commandercody]

Keep in mind google is mostly in direct competition with domain squatters using parked pages for PPC revenue. With the exception of those sites that use ad-sense which is mostly well established sites, and some blogs. By getting parked pages out of the ranking it only serves to benifit google by creating more advertisers wary of poor results from parked pages.