Matt,

Didn't you at one time say that the difference between paid links in
the Yahoo directory and their ilk versus other paid links was
editorial discretion? I mean, if the site being linked out to is
quality, why does it matter if it is paid or not?

It just seems to me that just because some webmasters will accept
absolutely anyone as an advertiser or sponsor that you can make the
leap to (All Paid Links === Spam), or even that automatically all of
them should be discounted, is faulty logic.

The way you are attacking this problem is never going to work. If you
really want to solve this, then what you will probably need to do is
modify the algo to factor in something along the lines of
NegativePageRank, where linking out to poor quality sites can have a
negative impact on your rankings. That right there would fix any
perceived lack of editorial discretion there is, and eventually self
censorship would level things out. Keep tossing things like the
penalties you are doling out and nofollow into the equation and
eventually you will end up with the ranking algorithm equivalent of
spaghetti code.

Peace.

On Dec 2, 10:45 pm, Matt Cutts wrote:

You really need to stick around here more to see how much regular
users like seeing their green bits do "unexpected" things to see what
"benefit" there is for the average user wrt toolbar PageRank.

How many users do you think understand that as the number of pages
indexed increases, the "value" of a given set of existing links will
decrease?

The number of questions we get here from people who have lost green
bits but their traffic and SERPs performance hasn't changed yet they
are upset over a stripe of green.

Add to that the number of users assuming that PageRank = SERPs
position and it would suggest most regular users would be better off
without.

You may not be able to see it because you are on the inside or maybe
just see a larger part of the whole picture than I do but the single
most beneficial thing I can think of to get webmasters back to the
business of building content instead of chasing links would be to get
rid of what they are actually chasing, s bunch of green pixels.

I can understand wanting to "punish" those who are obviously trying to
game the system but what if I am not trying to game the system but
just trying to make a few bucks on the side?  Of course I can add
nofollow tags but if I am not trying to hide it, couldn't Google
realize that I'm not attempting to hide them and just do whatever it
needs to do to protect PageRank determinations?

It may be a case of Google's success in so many areas leading me to
believe something should be able to be done in this area as well but
it seems to me that considering Google's success at inferring intent
in so many other areas, that Google should be able to do so in this
case also.

So slap them up one side of the head and down the other just as spam
sites and MFA sites get deep sixed on a regular basis.  But I and my
sites don't seem to have to worry about becoming confused with spam
and otherwise MFA sites.

On the other hand, you said, "the short answer is". Maybe you know me
well enough at this point so I'll ask this, if I knew the long answer,
would I then understand?

If the answer is, "Yes", I'll leave it at that because I have a
feeling that the long answer isn't likely available for public
consumption.

Craig

Becky

The only penalty that Google is dishing out is to the sites that sell
links and do not signal to Google that its a sold link. If sites that
purchase links get penalized, I would be buying links for my
competitors sites.

Hi Matt, Craig & webado, interesting thread!

Maybe I missed it but in answer to Kalena's original question "regular
advertising banners" in most cases go through a third party and/or
adserver.  In other words, site to a third party to a redirect to the
landing page.  It would be difficult to track cost per click, cost per
impression, post impression, cookie data and other activity if not for
the third party.  (IE DoubleClick a company Google is in the process
of acquiring) Point being, Google handles these with ease and knows
the intent is not malicious.

Phil, you could use a robots.txt to disallow that page if you are
concerned or implement nofollow tags.  Honestly, if you have an
established history of pages like this and you've not sold or paid for
links in the past or given Google a reason to believe otherwise, I'd
leave it alone.

(Matt, please feel free to correct me at any time if I'm wrong! :)

Google has vast amounts of data and they are the very best at doing
what they do! Personally, I trust Google and their ability to
determine paid links passing PageRank from normal links.

Honestly, my site is as important to me as yours is to you if not
more.  I've never paid for a link and never sold a link.  As long as
you are not doing anything that Google considers as being evil, I
don't think there is need to worry.  Bottom line, don't buy or sell
links!  Instead focus your energy on making great content that is of
value to users.  In some ways I think this is much about nothing if
you aren't doing anything wrong.

-Brian

"You really need to stick around here more to see"

I am having a good time hanging out on this group. I'll have to stop
by here more often.

Personally, I wouldn't mind removing the PageRank in the Google
Toolbar or swapping it with some other indicator, but that would be a
large undertaking. Maybe that can be a long-term goal for me. :)
Matt

On Dec 2, 9:34 pm, cass-hacks wrote:

We'll have to try to give you more reasons to do so.  Sometimes we
have some GREAT discussions on tech things, Flash, AJAX and similar
that although you might not be directly related to in your work, would
probably enjoy. Those along with many other tidbits of "WTF moments"
that leave most of us scratching our heads but are interesting none
the less although sometimes the "WTF" is referring to wondering why
someone can't see they are spamming the hell out of the search
engines.  :-()

You heard it here first folks!!!  :-()

The "some other indicator" thingy sounds very interesting!  PageRank
has always seemed too low level to me to be of much good other than a
cialis pumped e-penis for those that think that size matters.

I'd like to see something more at about the 30,000 feet level that
would give a much broader overview of a site's "value".  I haven't a
clue as to what that might be so I'll shut up and go off and ponder
that one for a while.  :-()

I do think though that the biggest thing that could be done to get rid
of the main problem, people buying links for PageRank, is just to get
rid of their ability to determine it in the first place.  Let people
sell links for traffic all they want but remove the benefit for those
who are likely the worst offenders, those who only sell for PageRank,
even though they may claim otherwise.

Craig

p.s. maybe we didn't hear it here first after all.  I seem to remember
somewhere in the back of my mind your saying something about toolbar
PageRank in the past although I don't remember exactly what it was or
when it was.  It is nice though to see that it isn't only us on this
side that wouldn't mind seeing it go the way of the Dodo even if we
all have to wait for a while before it finally happens.

Ok, here's one for ya:

My Blog lukuhlus.blog.de is hosted on blog.de, who use a system that
AUTOMATICALLY adds the rel=nofollow parameter to every link I use in
my posts, i.e. none of my links is actually worth anything. Based on
this important fact, can we agree that my links are therefore NOT
affecting the search engine results in any way, which is exactly what
you told us all for ages?

So when I did as you advised and I used links in such a SERP-neutral
way - why has my blog's Page Rank dropped from 2 to 0? I somehow
cannot imagine that it has to do with the websites linking to me (i.e.
that they've been punished, leading to a reduced PR inherited to me),
because from what I saw during several random checks, they look quite
unchanged.

So why am I punished for behaving exactly as you advised? Just because
the term "Trigami", which clearly marks every paid posting (so it is
by the way not even a hidden lure or something similar unfair -
everyone clearly sees that this is not my usual editorial content,
just like Google does with the paid ads at the top of the SERPs or the
adwords section at the right border as well!), is appearing somewhere
in my posts? But is the fact of my nofollow-links not worth anything?
Isn't the punish-clause something like "punish website if text
contains trigami UNLESS it uses nofollow"? If that's the case, I'm
really sad, because I really thought you collected this planet's
toughest brains for information retrieval and processing, so I cannot
believe that they didn't pay attention to their own rules of SERP-
neutral nofollow-linking...

I would be very curious for more information on this case.

Greetz,
Markus

I think the clarification post was a useful one since it's the first
real official comment on a google site about this that I'm aware of.
Personally I think Microsoft's quote in the article is a much better
way to put it though (I never thought I'd agree with anything coming
from Microsoft, but there you have it!):

" The reality is that most paid links are a.) obviously not objective
and b.) very often irrelevant. If you are asking about those then the
answer is absolutely there is a risk. We will not tolerate bogus links
that add little value to the user experience and are effectively
trying to game the system. "

So, paid links that are not objective and irrelevant are the ones that
are the problem. The rest are not mentioned.

I wish Google would put it the same way, especially seeing as all
examples ever given by Google fall under that definition. They're all
overly spammy examples and the kind that you can't help but to agree
with. Yet the world is not always that black and white and neither are
the many examples out there. A highly relevant on topic link could
still be paid for. Tripadvisor has paid links on tons of travel sites.
A relevant, high quality site by any measure. Yet it is in direct
contradiction to one of the main two points that this post is trying
to address: "- Inequities: Unfair advantage in our organic search
results to websites with the biggest pocketbooks". You could go on for
hours pointing out that the companies with the biggest pocketbooks
gain unfair advantages in search engines. Not just through paid links,
but also through pr and press releases or expensive link baiting
campaigns. I'm not saying that's wrong or bad, it's just extremely
hypocritical to say that. Matt, can you really say that with a
straight face looking someone in the eye? Mind you, I'd have written
the same too, since it's likely to ring a bell with a lot of
struggling webmasters out there, but to say it's a reason is totally
wrong.

On the topic of links passing link juice, what's the consensus on
affiliate programs that run through a few 301's to still pass link
juice for example? Naturally one would only put up an affiliate
program if it was relevant to the site (if they run a half respectable
site) so I assume this is okay?

How about press releases containing back links? Often people will pay
to have press releases put up on relevant sites. Okay?

How about highlighting people who have bought a product and linking to
their website directly (I assume this is okay since Google does this
on several high PR pages)?

How about the back links you get after a page on your site hits the
digg home page? They're often off topic and irrelevant but they should
still count as votes right? I mean they're linking to your site
because they like something on it.

Shades of gray.

Sam
ps. I think you should remove Yahoo from the list of search engines in
support of not paying for links since it's a well documented fact that
Yahoo goes out and buys and trades links for search engine gain.

On Dec 3, 9:24 am, cass-hacks wrote:

Many small businesses, honest mom and pop sites and even charitable
organizations were exploited, duped and conned into paying for links
under the misapprehension it was the only way their site would gain an
internet presence.
Google has rightly taken a stance against these wretched link sellers
and maybe I am a lone voice on this subject but I do not want to
return to the days of a phone call every Monday morning from some
*******g internet marketing company offering to sell a link that would
get whatever page into the natural results.
A classic example of the type of company who use to persistently phone
one of our shops every week is http://www.locallife.co.uk/productsandprices/standardlinks4.asp
in those calls they openly stated that your site will never rank
naturally in Google unless you buy a link from them. They were
extremely professional and extremely persistent to the point were you
are inclined to buy a link from them if only to stop them tele-
canvassing. Since I pointed out to them such links no longer influence
search results they have finally left alone us alone however for the
thousands of other businesses who are unaware of this they still sell
links to them.

PS. one of the claims by marketing companies such as locallife

"Locallife.co.uk is one of the largest providers of local information
to search engines such as Google & Yahoo."

http://www.locallife.co.uk/productsandprices/aboutll1.asp

Hi Matt

I have a question: link from corporate web site to other corporate's
site is considered paid link? Two site of same corporate.

Site A and B have two different themes. For exemple theme of site A is
Vegetables and theme of site B is car.

In this case Google looks whois database, the IP, or is Recommended
the nofollow?

Sorry for my English

On 3 Dic, 12:17, silverstall wrote:

How about your SERPs positions/rankings and Google sourced traffic,
have either been effected also or was it just a stripe of green bits
on a browser toolbar that lead you to believe you have been
"punished"?

Craig

If I were trying to use links to gauge whether a page was relavent to
a search term I would want to be able to tell the intent of the link
too.

In an ideal world
Only links that are placed to "inform" are really a vote for the
content.

Links that are designed to advertise and drive traffic to a site are
exactly that, adverts, and whether they are paid for or not are not a
vote of authority merely an advert.

Links that point to pages that expand upon the pages content should
carry more weight than a link to a page that just provides similar
information.

Links to unrelated pages would lower the 'trust' of the page and may
lower the strength of any other vote to other pages.

Links placed as adverts (see above) should not lower the trust of a
page, UNLESS that link was placed with the intent of pretending to be
informative.

I would hope that is an approximation of what Google is trying to
achieve and this used to work well before people thought about gaming
them by just adding as many links as possible.

There is nothing wrong with buying and selling links as adverts for
traffic but if it is just to try to gain organic search traffic then
anyone with an IQ over 20 must realise that it can't last.

I'd argue that Google used to be able to gauge intent better than they
are able to now, because of the panic they've created in terms of
adding no follow to links. I know I for one now add no follow to tons
of relevant on topic links out of paranoia if nothing else. And I'm
definitely not alone on that one! Likewise, Google's stance on
affiliate links has made many sites block those from the Gbot, meaning
that G now can't see if I link to a high quality top notch on topic
affiliate program or not. Matt's recommendations to nofollow links
within your own site to tailor your Pagerank flow is another such
case. As far as Google knows, that link could be going to
hardcoreporn.com, instead of a login or signup page. Or how about
cloaking of the nofollow tag so now only gbot sees it but all regular
users don't. All these changes to websites have been done purely for
the benefit of Google, not the user. This is directly opposed to one
of Google's fundamental core principles that they have told us from
the beginning; create pages for users, not search engine bots.

All these changes/things make it harder for Google to determine the
intent of the webmaster, not easier.

On Dec 3, 2:16 pm, Gissit wrote:

If I were a search engine giant I would not tag all of my bots with a
useragent that was easy to code for.

Question - If you are adding 'tons' of links that are to pages that
expand on your content than is your content too thin?

The nofollow is undeniably a pain and detracts form writing content,
but I think a necessary evil. I think I would rather have a way to
tell a search engine that this is not a qualified vote for this
resource than to hope that it can work this out itself. Given the
ammount of time and effort many webmasters spend chasing links I think
it is a small ammount to make sure the ones you give away are clear in
thier intent.

If anybody can come up with a truly scalable method (8 billion pages
to rank!!) to detect the intent of a link then I'm sure the SE's would
be very pleased to hear it. I would be surprised if anyone can come up
with much that has not already been thought of and tried.

On Dec 3, 12:51 am, beussery wrote:

.. For the purposes of manipulating PageRank, sure.

If I understand the rest of the thread then I seems the buying and
selling advertising is still ok? Banners and whatnot? What if they
don't pass through a click-tracker simply because I'm too lazy to
implement one? The ads are still there to get REAL PEOPLE to click
through and buy/read something, but they'll then look like paid links.
Worse, they'll "churn" since the most effort I've put in is to ensure
that they cycle and are picked randomly from a pool of ads.

Does this mean I need to break the rule of "ignore search engines" and
put nofollow on these links just to protect myself? Seems wrong to
me...

Cam
(Hi I'm new here).

It's a figure of speech. Even if it wasn't, wikipedia is a good
example of a site with great content that adds nofollow to tons of
links. Now google can't assess whether those links are good or not,
which they used to be able to do (by G's own admission, they totally
drop -as in don't look at AT ALL- these links from their crawls).

My whole point is that people are now no following links that they
normally wouldn't. Links that they are actually quite fine with saying
ARE qualified votes because they've checked out the product/site and
will vouch for it across from their users. However now that they're
left to decide whether Googlebot (or one of Google's manual reviewers)
will actually be able to figure out that intent, they would rather
choose the safe high ground and nofollow the link instead. It's quite
obvious to everyone, which is why these threads bring up so much
discussion, that there's a lot of us that don't have the faith that G
can detect the intent behind our linking actions and that's what
causes this kind of paranoia. If G was able to say with certainty they
were able to figure out the intent then we might remove the links
again, but then again, if G could say that it wouldn't even need the
nofollow tag to start with. In essence it's the question of intent and
the nofollow tag development is of course testimony to G admitting
that they can't gauge intent to start with in a lot of cases.

Yes.

On Dec 3, 3:12 pm, Gissit wrote:

Cam
If you are using banner images for adds I would imagine that there is
little to no risk that a search engine would consider these as quality
informative links. I would guess that they all know what a banner
looks like and know it is an advert.

If you are using text links with very little related content around
them and keyword heavy anchor text then this must be the sort of thing
to raise alarm bells. If there is no topical link between your page
and the link destination the bells get louder still.

If you really can't be bothered to add nofollow to links that are only
there for advertising then I think you just have to accept that a
search engine might consider that your page quality is related to the
quality of it's outbound links. Further, I would hazzard a guess that
a measure of the quality of an outbound link is as related to the
percieved intention of the link as it is to content of the
destination.

In my ideal world, an outbound link to a quality page that provides
more information on the same subject would be more beneficial that a
whole load of inbound links from free directories, paid article sites,
forum signatures, spammy blogs etc.

On Dec 1, 4:02 pm, Maile Ohye wrote:

Howdy,

I have no problems with Google's attempts to detect "Link Farms" or
other methods of stacking the ranking deck with links from domains
used only to artifically boost the rank of participating sites.  These
are abuses that can be detected based on the contents of web pages.

When you put the word "paid" or "buying and selling"  in the mix, you
have stepped into La-La Land where responsible programmers should tell
you, "Take this job and shove it!"

You can detect the methods of displaying links.  However, it is
physically impossible to tell if money was paid for them.  Even a
human, looking at the web page, can often only guess at whether money
was exchanged.

I would like to hear the real reason Google has put this policy in
place and what Google hopes to accomplish with something that requires
people to file complaints for enforcement.

Chris
BIZynet Coordinator

This is really useful, but does not answer one key question.
If you "buy" a link from a highly regarded online source such as a
directory Yellow Pages type service, how do you view it. I've had
discussions with such services, and they seem very hazy on this
subject. If I buy a listing for a physical bricks and mortar location,
so I get some text, a map - my phone ect, plus a web link, I don't
feel this is wrong. I'm promoting a business through a site with
millions upon millions of listings with a brand name that brings in a
lot of people via direct traffic. They might not even find the site
via Google, but type the URL directly. Some of the companies I am
talking to use nofollow, others do not - and while I can make the
point to them, I am hardly in a position to insist - though clearly if
they are violating your best practise, they should be thinking about
it.

JG

On Dec 1, 11:02 pm, Maile Ohye wrote:

Hey Cam T

Yes, that is correct and what Google talks about here:  "Not all paid
links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal
part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and
not for manipulation of search results."

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66736

Best of luck to you!

-Brian

Must confess to being a little confused as to why no follow tags are
said to have such an impact on website visitors. They're not aware of
them and most wouldn't know what they were.

Google are essentially trying to protect their business model. An
advertising business, fronted by a loss leader, Google Search, which
is the best available and very popular with users. They must of course
remain popular with website owners as well, Google may not strictly
owe them anything but a mass falling out that became too public would
cause severe damage.

My belief is that the steps Google have taken are in essence popular.
Despite an inevitable concern with SERPs position, the majority of
website owners would like to see an honest playing field. The big
business budget impact is something of a red herring, in so far as the
same applies to every other aspect of the business world. In many
ways, Google give more opportunity to catch up and become a bigger
business than most. Haven't seen too many good TV stations, or
newspapers offering a few years free advertising.

Equally, Google did not implement the current regime for no reason.
The actions of a not tiny minority have forced their hand, to protect
their business. At the same time, they doubtless believe they are
protecting and helping their users, by maintaining openness and the
best search facility. Unfortunately, that is not entirely happening.

Short term, many small business owners are being misled. Silverstalls
comment about lowlife.co.uk was interesting and this approach is being
replicated. The "damage" recent changes have caused many web
advertising companies has brought some to redouble their sales efforts
and this does not stop at small organisations. To prop their own
business model, one of the largest UK directories recently dropped
free website listings, contacting millions of business owners to
request payment instead. The emails were a little misleading and the
sales calls very much so. They clearly went down the road of stating
how useful the spend would be, because of the help this would give to
search engine ranking. Guess what, they're no following the links.

Neither does  the problem stop there. A .org.uk, essentially a charity
has recently undergone a makeover. They weren't prepared to accept the
no follow plan, feeling this was deceptive. Instead, they removed
every link they had built up which was not 100% relative, thus
disposing of a useful community resource. Many site owners have
suddenly adopted no follow as a norm, whether entirely needed or not.
There will be others that maybe won't go back through their site but
be cautious in future, making newer sites seem less relevant than they
actually are. Taken at face value, the whole way the web was built
could be overturned. Creating the world's best search engine at least
partly on link value and then discouraging links is far from ideal.

The best hope is Google itself, a company that I believe deserve a
level of trust. Time moves on and ten years down the road, they may
well feel able to value sites in better ways than just link relevance.
Let's hope for our sake and all the users that they're right.

On Dec 3, 5:35 pm, kzinti wrote:

And I think that sums it up quite nicely.
If you consider that the original concept of using links stems from
published papers that cite other documents as references. The theory
goes that if a document is cited by many others as a reference source
then it must be a good source. If all these papers carried a bit of
text that said 'Eat at Joe's Pizza Parlour' would you think that that
was a good reference or just an advert?

Now to preserve the accuracy of organic search the SE's are saying
that they choose to ignore the adverts. Seems like the right thing to
do to me. Trouble is that it is very hard for them to know what is
citation and what is just a plug (advert, paid or not). In a system
designed to retrieve the most relevant data for a given search string
this is obviously of primary importance and if in doubt it may well go
the wrong way rather than trust an unsure source.

Where the contention seems to be is that the SE's have put thier hands
up in admitting that it is not an exact science and asked webmasters
to tell them when a link is NOT a citation.

Is this wrong? Well in a perfect world they would be able to work it
out, but they really can't. Anyone with even a fundamental knowledge
of programming will have a good idea just how complicated this would
be for even a few hundred pages and no matter how you approach it
there would be an army trying to find a way to circumnavigate your
code if it would give them a competitive edge.

And so we have the nofollow in order to let the organisers of data
know our intentions. Not because we have to, but because we don't
trust them to get it right. If you sell links that are optimised for
anchor text from high PR pages and you don't use it, well you have
been warned.

I have seen many people complaining about it, mostly because they are
worried that it will have a bad effect on their organic traffic
because the links that point to them no longer have the same value or
are running a bit scared at the thought they might be labelled as link
sellers. Many others are complaining that a lot of site owners do not
know that it is a problem to sell links to game the SE's and they
can't see why it is wrong to make some money from it. I really don't
bellieve that it matters whether money changes hands, only that the
link is there to try to game a search engine into giving the
destination page a better rank.

Of course for everyone that has been complaining about a link based
ranking system this may be their golden hour. Once the nofollow word
gets out there won't be a link that passes PR left within a few months
as the masses all start editing their link directories to try and save
themselves.

I myself wonder whether this is the begining of a two tier web with
the only sites left passing real PR being those that are well
researched editorial sites that keep on top of the sites they link to
and everyone else will be left trying to find a way to get a mention
on them.

If you have not read the Google Story it is well worth a look. I
really do believe that they are still trying the achieve the same
goals that started the company in the first place and I fully expect
that in the future there will be more subtle changes that will be put
in place in order to try to better rank the quality of web pages. In
the end Google's users will decide whether it offeres the most
relevant information for them. From where I sit I can only see this
improving that.

On Dec 3, 10:41 am, Gissit wrote:

They are images and the links are not keyword stacked. The images
however are often served from on-site and they aren't always standard
sizes.

It's not that I can't be bothered. I will if I have to. I just don't
think this requirement is compatible with the "ignore Google when
coding" idea. Times change and I will to.  But I don't have to like
it.

Thanks for the responses everyone!
Cam