Google seeing FREE links as PAID links?

I don't see this point raised anywhere else, so here goes.....

Say a directory owner offers a one day special to DPers.

So I submit to that directory and 'skip payment'.

Next day, the offer is closed and the directory is once again a paid directory.

My 'free' link now sits on a page full of 'paid' links...

G will presumably see my link as a paid link and give it little or no value

 

we get penalized because G doesn't know the difference, mmm thats a nightmare and hardly fair.

 

google won't penalize your site they will penalize the directory , they are against unnatural link building.It is not like " hey hands up you were paying for your link , now you'll go to the jail" they use bots not agents

 

I agree somewhat to this statement. I don't think it will effect your site.
But if you have your site link in too many paid directories you might get penalized.

 

It has been said so many times: paid links would hurt the site that has the links in as for the sites that links are pointing to, they just will not get those links juice and not penalized, Why? because if Google did not do that every body will start to link to their competitors under paid links!

 

welll google increased my pr for having paid links on my site. This might be a first to everyone!

 

This discussion is STILL going on?

The sites that are penalized are the sites selling the links, this in effects hurts the sites buying the links since the site linking to them no longer have the same PR and SEO weight it once did.

This is why many sites lost PR who didn't buy\sell text links, it all trickles down this thing called the WWW (world wide web), all sites are interconnected by hyperlinks one way or another, never forget that.

 

I think google will penalize your site.

 

You obviously don't understand that directories do not equal not paid links. Google itself says to submit your site to directories such as Yahoo. Yahoo charges $299 a year to be listed. That directory is still being indexed and not penalized by Google.

A few individual directories did recieve some penalties as all sites occasionally do. That is because they went out and purchased High PR links to artificially increase the pr of thier directories and marketed thier directories by telling everyone to get listed there as the pr is so high. Google devalued those incoming links.

When Yahoo gets de indexed by Google then you may have something to say.

 

Very good point.

 

the buyer will not be punished by google. google is punishing the link seller now

 

are you saying your free link service site been used by some people to trade links through your site?

 

You guys can say they don't penalize people for buying paid links all you want, I disagree. I have 20 web sites. I purchased links for three of them (about 5 months ago). A week later, all 3 of those sites disappeared from the rankings (not banned, but nowhere in the top 500)...they were all top 10 for certain keywords before that.

I purchased maybe 2 or 3 paid links for each site...waited it out (as per advice here) and my sites did not come back. I then (after 4 months) contacted the paid link vendors and had the links removed. Now two of the three sites is back and in the top 10 again (third is still MIA).

My sites which I never bought any links to did not drop or improve drastically over the same period.

If Google does not penalize paid link buying then I am the victim of a rare and strange circumstance.

Note: I believe at least one of the paid link dirs that I purchased from were "paid only", that is the difference between Yahoo and those dirs. Yahoo still accepts free submissions...they almost never approve them, but they accept them.

BTW: I purchased the paid links on advice from this forum (before I was a member, just a lurker)...I wish I never had listened to that advice.

 

Jon,

I think if you pay for links on sites that are known to Google for being link farms and unrelated to your website content, you will have more issues.

 

No.


>>>Jon Murray - that is bad - or an extreme coincidence.

 

Yeah, that whole paid vs Free link thing is a big catastrophe. Most people who paid top dollar for links are really getting screwed over.....Glad I stayed away from it.

But like some other people suggested, I don't think is scenario fits in to the "free links" debacle.

 

but submitting in yahoo directory doesn't increase pr because the link doesn't pass any pr juice.

 

This is a huge issue. Just because a link "looks" like it is paid for definitely does NOT mean that it is. I have had to look through where I add links to my site to "avoid' them looking like paid links, even though they are not. What happened to linking to a site because they offer quality content? Is it our faults that G uses pagerank as part of their algo?

 

I think you are wrong. Yahoo Directory doesn't use the "nofollow" so if you're on a page with PR it should be passed.