Hi all. I was just reading this from cutt's blog. I have seperated the para into 2 seperate quotes for easier reading Look at the second quote. Basically selling and buying links MAKES IT HARDER for SEARCH ENGINES to return results. So I guess, the SEARCH ENGINES then OWN THE INTERNET to decide or lobby what SITE OWNERS may do with their links. Get my point. He also goes to say links are editorial votes given by choice and cannot be bought. Similar to Love. Or Sex Does that make link buying or selling unethical. Lets say a new site emerges and wants to be known, then I guess it just has to wait for the so called editorial votes to come and raise its site from the underground. Alot of people look at a sites pagerank before patronizind. Remember the KinderCare lawsuit against google?
Your taking this a little too far. Matt is not God and what he says means nothing except that he has a following that does listen. Search Engines don't own the internet but it is in their best interest to keep it clean so that their results are relevant this means they will attempt to stop you from using methods that can be spammed.
I've talked with him and he isn't a bad guy I just don't agree with him on some thing and don't recommend using him as a unbiased seo reference.
I totally understand that and respect google for having a public man between the public and itself. But ur not getting my point. about 30 years ago, AT&T was getting so big, that it literally owned the long distance industry. It had a monopoly and could dictate. Broken up by courts in an antitrust lawsuit. Microsoft took out netscape by passing out IE for free and argued that IE is an ESSENTIAL part of Windows. You always paid for the IE browser. The price was built into Ms Windows. It was never free. Courts ordered the breakup of Microsoft but it still functioned as one cause it could pay the several million dollars fine per day. Now comes pagerank. It is getting very big. People judge a site by it. It is gaining a monopoly. Which can be used any way which google likes. Look up the KinderCare lawsuit against google. It was all about pagerank
Up till pagerank you may have had a point but PageRank means nothing and is certainly not a monopoly of anything. Anyone can get any ranking on Google if they have time and patience. So they are not monopolizing anything. I agree that certain companies monopolize industries like electric. I don't like this but Google isn't like that.
Dude it is pretty much a standard of rating a website. People will not buy anything from or revisit a site with a Pagerank of 0 or low pagerank. They will say hey Hosting.com is a better company then Marblehost.com on their first visit cause of pagerank. Visit both sites, u will see. The point I'm trying to express is this. You've got this thing PageRank, mainly governed by the links to your site. What difference does it make where those links come from? Meaning if they are free paid, voluntary, etc. Take an analogy. Wealth, governed by the your assets and money in your bank account. Does it make a difference if you earned that wealth by becoming a doctor of if it was inherited?
A screenshot of my traffic this month at 1st search engine rankings blog would knock you off your chair. It is a PR2 but gets more traffic than a lot of PR7 sites or atleast ones I have seen. I do not sell links on my site so far and don't intend to soon but a clip of the stats would be enough to sell a link alot better than a high PR.
Ok I fully agree on your stats. But & only But. Lets say for instance you bought text links. Do you think, google has the right to not give u the PageRank which you would have gotten if those links were NOT PURCHASED? That is my only argument for this thread. Because that is what cutts is saying. I can find and post the phrase from his blog if needed.
Okay I see your point and no I read that too. But he doesn't need to know. When I buy links they are counted as regular links because Google can't tell. You got to be careful...
That's exactly what I'm saying. You spent your hard earned dollar buying text links. Why should you have to be careful????? You didn't do anything illegal. I mean we have this medium of measure called PageRank, calculated mainly by links. Now what difference does it make if those links are free, christmas presents, deliberate, acquired or paid for? So then this medium of measurement is biased, or discriminates the links, or tries to evaluate what causes a site to link to another site. And it also is saying that it does not acknowledge buying or selling links. I Don't see any law against buying or selling links in the U.S. Or acquiring links. Cutts is saying links should come naturally. Some topics acquire links faster then others. Say your passing out free hosting, or something else for free, 'Like the GOOGLE SEARCH BOX' on my website. Yes, according to google's tos, I am not allowed to edit the code in that search box, meaning I cannot take out the link to google.com, oops, i did on the homepage. O yea, u will get those links, faaaaaaaaaast. Now what if your site doesn't have something to offer for free. Or the theme is not very hot. Links will be slow.
Well think about the idea behind it. You are on the top for Web hosting. Ebay decides they want that position starts a site and buys thousands of links because they got money. They got your position. Google doesn't want positions to be taken by sites just because they are rich and that is why they do it. And we really can't complain as MSN and yahoo aren't worth fleeing to
The Web is a free market. A "link" is a form of advertisement. The problem is how can search engines differentiate between links that are there for "advertising purposes" and links that are there for PR purposes? Even some major websites sell links... so where are we heading? Overall however, the system works well, although there are sometimes glitches. Websites with good content will slowly move up the ladder as they will be "recognized" as such. Although it is possible to "buy links," that is not sustainable on the long-term.
Ok, let me tell u a little story before I reply to ur quote. In 97, I scrounged up every penny I had and my brother and I opened up a computer store in college park, md. We were systems integrators and were gonna hit it big. People loved our computers, cause we knew how to make them real well and they would never get that blue screen of death on windows 95 with our computers. But sadly we got wiped out by bestbuy, circuitcity and dell, and the other big guys. We could not build a system and make a profit cause dell and bestbuy and the other big integrators were getting the same exact components as us but at a MUCH CHEAPER PRICE. Because they had money. Nothing we could do about it. FTC promotes free trade for all. If we could have afforded to buy processors 1000s at a time, we could have bought them directly from Intel or AMD. Now getting to ur quote, if Ebay does what it does, then there is nothing stopping it. Just one of the pains and pleasures of Free Trade. Fair For All. And if it spends 1000s of dollars, then it is helping the economy, cause money is getting pushed around. Now if the FTC says, hey, ur not allowed to sell links, that is a totally different story. They are a bigger authority to decide then google.
So what about free directory submissions? How are they going to see these? having a lot of links is not everything in SEO. I think they should pay more attention on other things than this.
Exactly just like television. The internet Runs on advertising. Google runs on Adwords (advertising again) So in other words, google can also be saying 'HEY DON'T BUY THOSE TEXT LINKS THEY ARE NOT GOING TO HELP YOUR PAGERANK. INSTEAD BUY ADWORDS - THEY WILL BRING YOUR SITE TRAFFIC' u see what is going on. where this is all leading to?
I do not think they can do much to stop this happening considering many other big website also sell links for advertising purpose.
What google is saying, they can't stop it from happening. But u won't be getting any pr from links which it considers u paid money for.