Is it safe for me to link to Site Sift?

[SearchBoyGlobal]

On http://www.insurancesquared.com/white-hat I found this:

Let's look at a case on one end of the spectrum. There's a directory site located at www.site-sift.com. This site has been 'greybarred' or banned in Google. The speculation is that this is because they were advertising on www.oreilly.com. Oreilly.com is a very high profile website that sells technical books (and also accepts online advertising). The speculation is that by buying links on O'Reilly's website they were strictly attempting to manipulate the SE rankings by purchasing a link from an important site. That's probably what got them banned.

Is there any truth to them being involved with O'Reilly?
Is that why they got a PageRank 8?

Would it be dangerous for me to link to them.

[CReed]

Is it safe for me to link to Site Sift?

No, you should link to me instead - quick - send me a PM for the URLs :D

Seriously, Site-Sift is a quality directory and what you've found is old, exaggerated news. The Google Foolbar did display a white bar for Site-Sift, but only for a short period of time.

The best move they did was to remove the footer links - seems some people had the wrong impression of those links, made statements that Site-Sift was selling PageRank, etc.

The only person who knows the reason why they accepted sponsored advertising is the owner, and in reality, we shouldn't speculate on the "why" of it all.

I wouldn't worry about linking to Site-Sift and can't see any reason why you would suffer any repercussions for doing so. Point a few links at them, it's good for the web.

[dvduval]

I guess buying links is something that can also generate traffic for a site, not just PageRank. But directories can be especially under the "radar" when there is any appearance of buying links and then selling links all through the same site, because one interpretation of the result is that you are selling pagerank.

I looked at the backlinks on Google now, and it looks like they are no longer reporting any links from Oreilly that I could find, so it will be interesting to see what site-sift is looking like on the next update. If they are able to maintain pagerank, I may buy some links myself.

[smindsrt]

I guess buying links is something that can also generate traffic for a site, not just PageRank. But directories can be especially under the "radar" when there is any appearance of buying links and then selling links all through the same site, because one interpretation of the result is that you are selling pagerank.

I looked at the backlinks on Google now, and it looks like they are no longer reporting any links from Oreilly that I could find, so it will be interesting to see what site-sift is looking like on the next update. If they are able to maintain pagerank, I may buy some links myself.


What.... the last update wasn't good enough??? This is way old news... 6 months old now.