Its was over on Google Groups, i will have to post what he said tomorrow as im browsing on a phone so cant copy and paste. However its quite concerning to think someone can design a bunch of adult oriented Wordpress themes and stick your link in the footer and give them away.
I've bought links before, but you have to make sure they are good. Someone selling a PR5 link for 5$ is obviously going to put way too many on his site. While another person saying he is accepting a maximum of ten is a better choice.
buying links will be there no matter what anyone says. How else would you promote your sites effectively? It would take ALOT of work to be writing articles. However I do not recommend buying links in BULK and links that are relevant to your niche. If you are going to buy links, buy it in small quantities to advertise your sites so you can gain traffic
Internet is all about buying links. We all buy and sell links. A paid link is much more effective than a free directory link.
Hey ssandecki, Here is the link to an article that is describing the Wordpress link buying penalty. http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/the-final-nail-in-the-coffin-of-sponsored-blog-themes/ It links to the actual Google discussion group where Matt steps in. I think in this example of a link buying penalty the purchasing site was penalized because some of the link backs from a Wordpress theme were of pornographic and non-related nature. The penalized link purchaser actually had to write everyone who has the his links on their sites and ask them to remove them.
http://groups.google.com/group/Goog...read/thread/59e796b85327a4b2/59ff6ae317b03ee3 Yep, the actual Google Group link was in there! Thanks, I needed this for sourcing and citing different replies on DP and some of my websites, might consider another wikipedia edit if this keeps an actual neutral point of view. Only good part about doing massive editing on wikipedia is the ability to use your links on entries as long as it follows the NPV & NP rules
Thanks for the link David. So the key to screwing competition will be to mass release free porno wp themes with their link in it. Cool.
Well, if your site has a lot of off topic link backs, Google may look at that as spam. If you do not run a porn site, I believe these types of links could be looked at as spam and way off topic, therefore, hurting your placement.
Thanks yes that's the link, i been watching this one unfold and it's snowballed to people blogging about it. This can open a big can of worms, i can soon see Wordpress theme designers being contracted as assassins by designing themes for the adult market. I can appreciate Google wanting to protect the integrity of their search index, but the day a factor outside our control such as this effects if our businesses can pay the mortgage is quite disturbing.
The idea between buying links shouldn't be focused or dependent on for passing PageRank, but instead of receiving targeted interested traffic. Thus, I am never worried about buying links because I don't buy links for all the wrong reasons.
You need PR or better refered to as 'link juice' The Google toolbar is not a good seo metric on what pages flow the juice. But you still need link juice.
That's the problem, what your intentions are when buying the links and what the algorithm thinks of it all will be two entirely different things. The only way to "tell" the algo your intention is traffic and brand awareness unfortunately is Nofollow. I don't care about Pagerank, and i don't particularly like it either because over the years it's become wildly inaccurate to the point it's just a novelty metric. However i do like it when i receive a Dofollow link because can help with SERPs, as well as traffic and branding but whether it gives PR or not is the last of my thoughts.
Buying links from relevant sites I think is still good, though this is one thing that has turned me of google.com the past few months, their moves to shut down competition for advertising dollars- I guess it is all fair in business but I have started to not promote there online services as much as before.
We all agree end of the day it is SERP that people are concerned with google. If google algo still uses external links to determine the relevancy and authority of a site for SERP, then there will ALWAYS be paid links buy/sell, and 'link development' will still be a major responsibility for webmasters. I just see what Google doing now is trying to catch some big fish to scare others off, and trying to protect its adword revenue. The link trade market will still exist, but like everyone says PR is not a good indicator now. So my question is : what'd be your criteria to buy a 'good' link now?
Definitely there will always be paid link/advertising, it's just too hard for people to get their new business or site out there and starting to accumulate natural links and recognition. With the big fish scenario, i don't think so the site in question was just a ma and pa small business in a little niche locality market. I also had a site tanked, it went from xx,xxx uniques a day earning $450US a day and growing rapidly to just 200 uniques and zero revenue overnight. The site was found by more than 100,000 unique search terms in January now it can only be found via it's name. On site it was White Hat to the letter, so the only conclusion now is it's backlinks effected it. Speaking of Adwords/Adsense, my site was rapidly overtaking the #1 site in the niche who was a premium Adsense publisher and i was definitely effecting him going by the overlay of Alexa graphs and other data. As soon as i started to threaten a Premium Publisher i was tanked. Fishy stuff indeed.
Here are my criteria on choosing a website: When I have URL list with relevant content to my website Im using google for site:domainname.com to see website index, then using link:domainname.com to see how many backlinks are indexed and what are they (actualy i'm using SEOAdministrator to see the anchors, PR and URLs). Then i'm on YAHOO to find what page should I choose with site:domainname.com (YAHOO ranking the strongest page). Filtering. Now I have another list of URL the strongest one. Final step to choose the most relevant. Thats about it. Indeed Google penalize websites that has spam backlinks and thats the BlackHat to kill your competitors. The best blackhat to kill competitors is to use PHPproxies but you should be psycho to use blackhat.