Recent comment by Matt Cutts on SEOmoz: So... according to this statement, Matt has come right out and said that just because a site buys links is no reason to think that it shouldn't rank well. I blogged more about it here: http://smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.co...e-would-penalize-sites-just-for-buying-links/ Very interesting, especially considering his post on paid links here: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/selling-links-that-pass-pagerank/ He talks more about how links like that just shouldn't be counted, and not how sites should actually be penalized for it (which is what most people have assumed was going on). -Michael
The point he was trying to get accross is simple, just because a site is buying links doesn't mean it shouldn't rank well in SERP, just that the site that the link was brought from should have 0 weight SEO wise.
It is perhaps logical - they are saying we will penalise the site selling the links but not the site buying them: So the buyer has wasted his money - because he has not gained a benefit And the seller has gained - a penalty. It is a clever pincer movement designed to slowly suffocate the links market over time IMO - by removing the incentive to both buy and sell
And it is equally illogical to assume that a site that has paid links should not rank well as a result...
this means google's algo relies too much on backlinks, so they now use the "fear" tactic to prevent this
The buyer is getting hanged too, the investment they made is gone, they no longer recieve seo weight or pagerank for where they bought the text link
If they penalized link buyers it would be possible for webmasters who compete against eachother to get their competitors penalized by buying a lot of cheap crap links for them.
I am still not even sure as to why you would penalize link sellers. Who cares? If they have a high PR, let them use it for what they want.
hung well by google. our blog network of 350 blogs was selling links, all blogs were pr3/4 and google took all pr and de-indexed all 350 blogs for selling links. our 350 blogs are still making $300 a month on adsense lol TY Google smart buyers know that yahoo supplies more search results than google does, yahoo supplies other major search engines with the results, so buying links on our network today, with no pr, is still popular as yahoo and msn still give back links and your page still gets the traffic
It makes sense because these days there is so much buying and selling going on in this regard that it would be impossible to say whether someone bought a link or not. How do you distinguish (unless its blatantly obvious) whether a site got a link naturally or bought it. I guess, in the case of TLA and other similar sites, you would know because it would be trackable.
You are amazing!!! posting old news we all knew already.... Besides anyone with a scintilla of intelligence knows Matt C is a google puppet and lies purposefully to keep all the wanna be webmasters so confused they'll never know whats the truth.... anyway great job relaying really old news......
They are using it to allow people to purchase search engine rankings. Google wants to display relevant results, not results which pay for their links. That is a perfectly logical reason to penalize link sellers (unless they add nofollow).
Google has the highest search engine market share. Yahoo has more traffic in total, but not to the search engine section of their website. Google gets far more searches than Yahoo does.
Paid Links = Better search results Google wants to show relevant results to its users not webmasters trying to SEO terms such as "money" "business" etc for sites not even related to pwn the search engine traffic.
Youre very bright but do not fall for BS put out by Google.. Check the PR of this hugh link seller....... http://www.text-link-ads.com/ PR 7 Yeah there's a penalty for selling links.. ..it's called PROFIT!!!!!! F Google.. they lie worse than pinocchio