A) PR7 and above linking campaign can create quite an empact on the SERPs, specially for niches where other sites are not so SEO-aware. B) Having a negative opinion about the game does not mean that I will not play it. Deep down I am a big communist fan, but hey , as long as I am stuck in democracy/capitalism, might as well play it. Same for linking. I think it's wrong and will eventually die out due to the fact that it's no different from the old keyword-spamming-meta-stuffing days(specially directories, sig links and spam blogs), but as long as it exists...
What I am trying to say is that if you are a site owner and you could sell advertising / links on your site with textlinkads for about $50 per month and then if you went with another company and only could get $0.50 CPM, and you new you couldn't quite get about 5,000 pageviews of that 2nd option then you would end up making more from textlinkads. Now as a website owner you would want to earn the most from your advertising space and a link on your site from textlinkads or a link on your site from the 2nd CPM option is still selling advertising on your site. It is just different for the buying. How do you know, the webmaster that the buying is going to buy your advertising space for actual advertising or for just PR gain. If google penalises the sites selling the links /advertising then that is truely wrong. They should just give them either less link benefit or penalise the people buying them. All a site wants to do is to get the most money for their advertising space, just like Google Adwords.
PR is NOT advertising space .Buying PR is for eventually manipulating the results on SERPS. It doesn't generate visitors because they have a link on your site, it generates visitors because now google thinks that the site that was linked to is a relevant resource for certain keywords. You can just put nofollow on all sold links, effectively selling only advertising space instead of "SERP manipulation space"
You're still confusing advertising with PR buying. Google doesn't "penalize" selling or buying links, per se. Even with the very blatant PR selling schemes, what they do is neutralize the PR value of those links. If the purpose of the links is advertising, the seller and buyer isn't going to care about PR. If the purpose is Google ranking manipulation, you won't be "punished" / penalized - you just won't get the PR value you think you're buying. Edit: Computer(Jew) has it right - s/he was posting as I was typing.
I know what PR and advertising is, I am just saying that the person selling the ad space on their site is just selling it to the highest paying advertisers. Now if Google would penalise the site owner for selling that ad space because you have a high PR site and google thinks your are selling the ad space so that the buying can increase their PR then that would be wrong, but as you said, they will not penalise the site owner but devalue the links, which is alright. As to using nofollow, alot of people with these ad networks can't use it as it will mean that you have to change the tracking code and will break their TOS just like putting nofollow on Google Adsense ads. Anyway, I thought Google have been de-valuing these types of PR links for ages now, I just thought that because all of this has just been said about Matt Cutts and PR links that they were going to start penalising the sellers of advertising, but I guess they are just going to keep devaluing the links PR value.
And exactly what is the source of your statement? Matt Cutts or any other person from Google for that matter has refused to give any details. You are guessing and decided to be an optimist. If you wish to "trust" Google blindly be my guest, put please don't put across opinions as facts. Best regards, George
Correct. This isn't anything new. It's just perhaps a new method of discounting PR that Cutts is hoping to test with submitted links. That's simply not correct. Cutts and others have made some very specific statements on a number of occasions over the past couple of years about the discounting of paid links, and it's also been very clear that in the vast majority of cases it IS about discounting, not a "penalty". Do your homework.
I have seen Matt talk about de-valuing links but I don't think there was ever a statement that they are actually doing it. Please post some quotes.
This is not rocket science or difficult research. Put a little effort into it yourself - that's what "do your homework" means: http://www.google.com/search?source...-29,GGLJ:en&q=matt+cutts+buying+selling+links http://www.google.com/search?source...006-29,GGLJ:en&q=matt+cutts+buying+selling+PR http://www.google.com/search?source...6-29,GGLJ:en&q=matt+cutts+discounting+link+pr http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=matt+cutts+discounting+link+pr&mkt=en-us&FORM=OPNSCH
Thanks for the advice on how to use search, but why make claims if you are too lazy to post quotes? I am not saying you are wrong but I am saying that if you want to make those claims you should at least post the quotes that support it. I have been reading Matt's blog for the past 8 months and don't recall any claim that they are actually de-valuing links. I have read a lot of stuff about how they will try to figure out what is paid and what is not so they 'can' do it but not that they actually do it already.
Oh, but I did my homework. Here is a comment from Matt Cutts himself and if I'm not mistaking the very last comment he made on that post (I have put in bold the words that drew my attention): Now excuse me if I don't share your faith in the Google's "do no evil" philosophy. Sporting such a trust to ANY company or individual is in my opinion plain wrong. They have a monopoly position on the search engine market and they intend to use it for their own profit (in this case burying the alternative contextual advertising networks). Of course you may be right. The point is that nobody knows. There hasn't been a comprehensive explanation from Google. This lack of transparency is causing right now huge damages to networks like TLA, ReviewMe, PayPerPost and the such and this IS a fact. Best regards, George
Excuse me? Who's being lazy here? I gave you the links. Hint: Try going back a little further than the past few months. This is nothing new. Try going back a little further than this week before you state so emphatically that "The point is that nobody knows" and "There hasn't been a comprehensive explanation from Google". Start with the links I posted above.
Let me make it easy for you. Start here: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/tell-me-about-your-backlinks/ There are also several - make that numerous - threads on this topic here at DigitalPoint alone. Look for Google's and/or Cutts' comments on pixel pages, notorious PageRank merchants, and the like. Look specifically for what response Google took to the more notorious or blatant violations of their guidelines on link buying and selling. There is plenty of information out there. Find it yourself.
Thanks, I still think you could have provided this supporting information without being so condencending.
Had you asked in a less obnoxious manner I might have done that, although I will admit I resent the current social climate which seems to demand spoonfeeding. You'll always learn more if you do your own research. You'll also avoid getting swept up in the rampage of the lemmings.
Fair enough, Matt Cutts has explained a drop in SERPs . But am I the only one here wondering how those paid links were detected? The point is that absolutely nobody knows the answer except for the Google engineers. Actually this is the kind of post that would worry me sick. Think about it! We are supposed to trust the algorithm that it won't make any mistakes and that no additional penalties will be incurred to sites as a whole. What you see as plain evidence that such a thing will not occur can be easily interpreted otherwise. I will quote the same paragraph, but with other boldened section, please also note that the post you quoted is two years old, but for the sake of the argument I will pretend that it still holds relevance: Am I the only failing to see the concrete proof, am I the only oneassuming that all the outbound links from the website network in question are treated as paid links?
It is really hard to say and I think Matt and G are being ambiguous on purpose. As many have said before, G is a for-profit company and they are not in business to help webmasters make money or anything like that. The crux of their business model relies on giving the most accurate search results possible and they will do whatever they can to protect that. There is no real argument that paid links skew those results and G has to find a way to account for that. I think the trick will be how they can do that without p-ssing off one of the major cogs in their profit-making machine, the webmaster.
I have never trusted the algo. People seem to think that it is the best in the world and that it does everything. Google's algo is more powerful than human and do things much better. But nothing is perfect and things can always be improved. Googles Algo is not perfect and is the reason why they are keep changing their algo all the time and knocking out different sites on the way.
No. Google isn't concerned about pissing off webmasters. They are concerned about keeping their search results as relevant as possible (or at least maintaining the public belief that this is the case) and keeping their public profile as high as possible. That's what keeps Joe Public using Google as the default/preferred search engine and what keeps advertisers giving Google all those advertising dollars. As long as they are the #1 search engine -- and make no mistake about it... they still are -- they won't lose any sleep over annoying every webmaster in the world. They are not delivering their search results to webmasters. They are delivering them to the average searcher. And in turn to the advertiser. Period.
"Google sites fourth quarter revenue totaled $1.98 billion, or 62 percent of sales. Partners sites, the ones that use the AdSense programs, brought in $1.2 billion in revenue." It is the webmasters that are the publishers for their adsense programs, so webmasters are still important. I don't know the breakdown as to how much of the revenue is derived from adsense shown in search results compared to publishers but I think it would be a significant hit if 'webmasters' stopped using adsense/adwords and stopped publishing.