I suggest remove all of the "nofollow" rel from links over the world ... we helped google with nofollow links to "filter-us" and now in sgin of protest lets remove all rel= "nofollow" from links in 3 months
feha, what you said is almost impossible because we're not any of the big players here. we're small to medium size website owners registered on this forum. Considering many people wouldn't agree with you, your idea about removing the "nofollow" has no chance of success. Anyway, untill now people generally didn't use the nofollow tag and they were penalized too. What's gonna happen from now on? I don't know and I'm little worried how new sites will build their link popularity in order to get ranked in SERPs at least... Somebody has any opinions about it?
Most of the USA economy is due to small business. This is true for many other countries as well. As soon as you stop worrying about a search engine and start building a business you'll be on the path to financial freedom. But thats just my opinion. Peace!
Nonsense. Spiders can't log in. Spiders can't read PMs. Spiders can't "see" any area of a forum (or any other site) not accessible to guests. If the AdSense code is on a page that the bot can't read, it will still try to supply ads that fit the overall theme of your site, i.e., that match the content of other pages on your site. The fact that ads display there doesn't mean the spider is reading that page. You don't need to know the answer to those questions. Neither do I. Only Google has to know how it's done. And obviously they can do it. As much as it pains me to say this, Sem is correct. See above. They can detect paid links. They've demonstrated that pretty convincingly. Get used to it. If that's true, I suspect it's only because you rank too low in Google to get any traffic from them. There is no way a site with decent rankings in Google, Yahoo, and MSN is going to get most of its traffic from MSN.
Well, I used to have a good amount of traffic from Google and I still do! What has changed is that I get more from Windows Live. So it wasn't one on the expense of another or anything like that. That said, I don't think there is much to be disputed about the truth of the fact that Google is not God or the only search engine around. So.. imagine this. Imagine a site that is so well optimized for, say, Yahoo, which is still a substantially popular search engine, and gets practically no traffic at all from Google. The site owner makes loads of money on this traffic because even though Yahoo has a smaller market share, his stake in the Yahoo traffic pie is in number bigger than his stake in Google would be (hypothetically). In other words, the guy is well off and doesn't depend on Google *at all*. I would say it's quite possible that there are sites which would fit this description and prove that you don't have to depend on Google if you don't want to. It's just that most people suck up to Google's rules thinking, since it's the biggest engine this also must mean they will only get biggest traffic from Google. The thing is, since everyone targets google it actually becomes harder , at least in theory, to compete in its realm than in a realm of another search engine, but I'm getting into speculation here. But yeah, the bottom line is, Google is not the only traffic source you have to worry about so while it is smart to significantly take it into consideration as a traffic source, it is not very prudent to obsess about it and everything it does. And that's the whole point. Google penalizes sites within their own view. You don't have to feel penalized if you don't want to. It's just one search engine saying "I don't like you". So what? If you care, go and adapt to them. If you don't, go and befriend someone else. Just some random thoughts. Cheers
I'm not disputing that one shoudn't try to rank well in all three of tghe major search engines. But the stats for Google's advantage are based on the number of people using Google to search and they still own over 60% of that market, according to the latest statistics I've seen. That leaves 40% or less to be shared amont Yahoo, MSN, Ask, AOL, and others. My point is not to ignore the others. My point is that you'd better be worried about your Google ranking because if you aren't that's a lot of potential traffic you're not going to see.
I agree we need to worry about it, take it into consideration, but not necessarily obsess with PageRank, cause it's not always reflecting true SERPs, link popularity and traffic (and hence the overall real value of the site), both in Google and other search engines. Cheers
I have to go with 'its the same" because: On the sites where I bought high PR links to my site, my sites have high PR. On the sites where I didn't buy high PR links to my site, my sites are now low PR. This is simple logic. Occam's razor. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, its probably a duck.
Indeed. If Google was so big and bad, why are they asking for help in their Webmaster's Tools? I think we've all seen the "Report Paid Links" part of that, right?
you may be right but only when you buy apple links from cherry site! if you buy apple links from apple sites then thats perfect, if you remember google algorithm is based on pagerank(backlinks!) don't forget that guys!
Sometimes, it's only dressed up as a duck until it's discovered that it's a fake duck. As I just said on another forum, any of the PR manipulations will likely work for a while -- until they're detected, at which point your site will drop like a stone. They were asking for help to improve their algorithms for detecting paid links. And they've now done that. What do you think this update over the past couple of months has been all about?
Great article. I get this feeling of 'Police and Thief' scenario... eventually, Google will give up as the thief is always one step ahead.
Exactly, google can only 'react' to the paid link users tactics. And thus train the link sellers to behave a different way, and then react again, etc. Remove the motivation, and the 'problem' would go away. But not really because links provided traffic benefits even before google was born.
Reading all the pages of this thread, I am wondering what I am going to do. I am a total SEO noob and am currently building my website. Nevertheless, I still think I will be buying relevant links to build up page rank.
I see this as a scare tactic. There is no way google can tell 100% that a link is paid. They can look at a page on sellers site saying 'buy textlink here', and can make the assumption that if there is a group of textlinks bundled together somewhere on the site (usually homepage/sitewide) that these may well be paid links...but thats a few assumptions there...are we to be penalized on assumptions without conclusive proof?? Ultimately they want us to stop selling/buying the links independently and start buying 100% through adsense...crazy!
1. Who told you SEO was a wise choice? Do you understand what an algorithm is and how one works? 2. Are you a business owner trying to do SEO or an Seo trying to do SEO? 3. If you want to have a chance to do well, stop posting in public forums that you are going to buy links. Google filters / dampens Very rarely do they penalize when they do it's usually a ban. Adsense is for webmasters to publish Ads and earn revenues....no link buying here, and even if you could Google devalued their own OBLs so as to not help sites rank well. In other words no PR power. If you meant Adwords same thing applies, Adwords Ads have no PR power. Besides Google has said it's fine to buy links for traffic (Read: Adwords Advertising) Peace!
sorry, i did mean to say adwords! Feels to me like they are trying to push all website advertising sales towards adwords/adsense
This is quite confusing. I have partner links in my sidebar, but they are not paid....they are links I share with my visitors for content. Would google assume they are paid links because they are listed in my side bar titled: parnter links?