Hidden links

I find the cant even manage the spam reports they get, I don't know how they expect to handle the millions of reports they would get if everyone where to report their competitors because they "think" they maybe bought those high PR links...

 

I was going to reply to you to say what guerilla said, so I'll just quote them too...

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I'd actually guess that competition is the exact reason Google is doing this. If they can stop us from selling our links on our own we'll be forced use programs like AdSense.

I used to REALLY like Google, but those feelings are starting to wane. I wonder if they realize they are becoming "one of them".
Q

 

it's intesting to read . nobody can know if one link is piad or not. google is a perfect search engine but google can not know this too

 

We might be miss understanding the google concept .

We we have an adwords link on our site its not a direct link to the real site , its a redirect link .

And google say its ok to put a redirect so in term of SEO , it wouldnt be counted as a backlink .

 

Absolutely! This is really a different case though. I'm not really making a case for for such a broad spectrum. Most of my customers are more than happy to put a link back to my web design site and they are all way off theme.

What I was suggesting is speculative, in that *if* google wanted to focus on finding paid links, searching for html containers that contain the title words "advertising" or "sponsors" (or words to the affect) would not be difficult to do.

On the other side of this though, it wouldn't be hard to circumvent once webmasters discovered it. Just preclude the use of those words.

 

How to define if a link is a sponsor!
you may pay money but you cant pay links?

 

I think Aaron Wall summarize it very well on ThreadWatch :

http://www.threadwatch.org/node/13925

 

Update from Matt Cutts :

 

hidden link
((( using CSS to make hyperlinks that are tiny, like 1 pixel high text )))

what is that? any example code?

 

here's a code ...

.hide {
           color: white ;
           font-size: 1 px;

          }

Code (markup):

 

How would I search for that in, say, a wordpress theme?

 

If u want to use this code you need to put it in your style.css

and then assign a class="hide" to what you want to hide .

so to search it you need to look in the style.css and search the name of the class that have 1px , then go back and search if he really applied it ..

 

many many big profiles selling the blog post.. like shoemoney... am sure he don't afraid like this one post, he would like to replay to matt... hey matt, how'd you like my easter gift ?

surely, google should penalize those site who linking to different themes link.

 

i dont think shoe care about Google penalizing his site or no ... he already made money that can cover all his life expense

 

They know, how could they not know...DP is one of the largest webmaster forum, and Matt himself is a member here

but the thing is, there is no way to tell if the thread is start by the site owner. You can just start a thread with any URL. So can they just punish every url that show up in that forum..

That report thing is funny. Can i screw up my competitor by finding all his link and report all those site

 

There is the same discussion of this same thing from Matt Cutts blog in the link development area.

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=298967&page=4

 

You know what? you are giving me idea... lol

but i wonder and guess that they facing tons of pms every hour. how do they replaying to everyone and take action ?

 

The sheer volume of pages that exists in the world requires that Google do thing s automatically by writing rules for their alogrithm. So of course they can look at patterns, and placement of words used next to links (and perhaps even graphic file names (You can always put text on images) but the reality is there is no definitive way to know if the link is purchased or not.

I myself use plenty of unrelated links out from my own sites to other sites I own. And this is not necessarily a bad thing if you have enough diverse incoming links from other sites to support it. I also often don't care about Google's crawl (even though they have the most search volume) as the other search engines still generate traffic. I also place links for people to use in spite of what a Search Engine Bot might think.

It's not about pleasing Google its about making money. And there are more ways to make money than to just Kiss Googles bright shiney hiney!

 

Yeah they can't really know all of the paid links, but just mentioning that they are gonna be on the look out will hurt link sales some. Buying links isn't really fair for a poor site owner that has better content, but can't get enough links to compete with the link buyers.

On the flip side, a lot of poor site owners are the ones starting all those damn MFA pages that are just about useless to the internet.

 

Well. So now google wants us to use either javascript, redirection or nofollow for links on our sites. The normal link is a problem now. Definately, there will be a mess.