I mean people keep saying Google doesn't want sites passing on page rank, yet at the same time people are saying page rank in meaningless, or has little significance to your search results - including someone from Google I saw in an interview with WPN. So, if page rank is of such little importance why is there all this fuss about penalties for trying to pass it on - surely the only people who care about page rank are the people buying links?
in my opinion, there is only one reason that google wants to stop selling links. google wants people to buy links from its services. google has started to pay this game with an unfair way.
I thought about that the other day, it certainly seems that way from one perspective at least. It is their search engine though so I guess they can do whatever they like with their results et cetera, people can always use Yahoo or MSN instead. Nevertheless, I would like to believe that this isn't what they are doing. I wish they would just ignore irrelevant links though or something. I'm sure there are many people selling links from good sites to other good sites, links that are still useful to their visitors, and I'm finding all this demonizing a little unsettling. It's making everyone suspicious about everything Google does, and way too self-conscious about what they are doing with their sites.
They want you to use adwords/AdSense combination. some how you need to put google on the payroll. If you make money and if you don't share the revenue with the MOB Boss they don't like that. Big G is the MOB boss of www world
I agree with you all, but you have to admit if Patrick Gavin (TLA Owner) had never opened his big mouth and made claims like " Improve your traffic and search engine rankings. Only TLA can deliver an ad that does both.", most of this rubbish wouldn't even be being discussed. Personally, I've never bought nor sold links for pagerank. I've never been concerned with PR, never worried too much about SEO or SERPS but I've still managed to build very successful websites. How ? Word of mouth. Just like when I was a musician, if you're in a band, the best way to get people to come see you play is to go to other people's shows and network. As an example, the baseball forum in my signature (just started 4 months ago), it's growing steadily, I go to a lot of baseball games and I take business cards I print at home and when I start talking to somebody and they seem to be a fan like me, I give them a card. Unfortunately 60% of my forum members right now are Phillies fans because I go to Phillies games but I just got bumped to first page in Google for one of my keywords. I used to not care about search engines because it seemed no matter how much content I produced on my sites, some crummy,spammy junk website full of banner ads always was in the top Google results. Well, suprise, suprise. Whatever Google is doing now is A-OK with me, suddenly my sites I've worked very hard on are appearing not only on page one, but I've even landed a few at the #1 spot in Google !!!
Google is a publicly traded company in the US. Their main concern is not the webmaster community, it is creating as much revenue for their stockholders as possible. If they don't do that, they can be sued by their stockholders. Money is indeed the reason, but they're not "turning" evil. By going public they put themselves in debt to a community whose main concern is profit.
The number one reason is they don't like sharing the pie. The number two reason it buying links messes with their ranking algorithm, so they either need to improve their algorithm or stop paid links. Plus there are many purest webmasters that have been complaining loudly about folks buying links having an unfair advantage over their blood, sweat and tears hardwork.
well said. The first reason is more essential for Google. IMO, Google should fight first with spam or black hat SEO instead of paid links.
I personally think MFA sites are a much bigger problem than paid links. Google adwords and adsense customers are all losing money to these sites and they mess up the search results much worse than paid links.
OK, you have a great site with useful content nice design, etc. You have some natural link building and you rank very good for your main keywords. One day, a guy with a very big budget, but a crappy site, full of ads, not a line of original content, decide to rank you out for the same content and start to buy a couple of hundred PR7/PR6 links. In a couple of weeks his crappy site ranks much better than your. How do you feel? Does that damage google? Yes. Will that be of any help for people searching about that topic? NO. IMHO this is the only reason google wants to stop this link commerce, also supported by the lack of pagerank update in the last quarter. If the PR is unkonwn/uncertain you cant trade it.
cant agree more and really surprised that people still like to accuse google for no valid reason. Link sellers are screwing with google algo. These guys ca buy 10 PR 8 links and can dominate SERPS with crap site who even a 1 yr old would not bother to read for more than 2 mins. Adwords and paid links penalty has no corelation.
I think it's one thing if you are buying links that are relevant to your topic, niche site etc, but buying it for pr ranking is a problem. Even if they change it there still be another way to capitalized on the new change that google makes. I have bought links for pr tactics, but never notice any big increase so now I only buy links to bring in traffic from relevant sites. Stan
Because ,it hurts google algo and search results.Not quality page but more backlinks you could rank top on serp.
What you said is very true. I also think that Google is doing this because they are thinking of making their search results cleaner and more reliable. IMO, even if Google doesn't want to admit it, the Page Rank idea has can be easily exploited. It's good that Google gives the power to "vote" or "categorize" a website to the Internet Community, but at the same time they have made a loop-hole in their indexing algorithm. How they will patch it up will be a very interesting thing/event to see.