Matt Cutts and the paid links

Google is not evil, The men running it are doing business, They just want people to use adwords instead of manipulating the rankings by buying links.,

Nothing comes free,

 

Nonsense. See my previous post, just above yours.

 

Anyone solely buying links for PR has missed the point. It's all about traffic.

 

Sometimes it feels like they want every body to use AdWords and AdSense but when you buy links, you can manipulate their whole so called PageRank technology (if you do it right).

 

I would assume that Google's supposed purpose behind this is to eliminate spammy results from the search results. You know the sites, they use bots to autosubmit their sites all over the internet, comments on blogs, in forums, anywhere a link can be added to a signature or comment. Oh wait, they're all free, and therefore more valuable than paid links, so sites doing that should rank higher.

 

Don't be silly. What makes you think those kinds of links are "more valuable than paid links" to Google or any other search engine? Do you really believe that Google counts my 13,000+ sig links here as 13,000+ individual links? And do you really think even if that were true that such links would pass the same weight to the URL(s) in those sig links?

 

No, I don't think 10,000+ sig links in a forum are all counted, however, they are unpaid links, and Google wants to favour unpaid links over paid ones. Probably, only one of those links is counted, and the rest are dismissed as duplicates.

With what Matt Cutts is suggesting, such a link would be favoured over one that has been paid for, which would mostly benefit link spammers, rather than someone who actually cares enough about their site to pay to advertise it.

BTW, got a good idea from that 66 link building article, thanks.

 

We have seen their afforts to improve the search results in the past and all these efforts were pathetic and harmed innocent webmasters instead of hitting Spamy site.. Google is and will be full of spam pages unless they (really) work on improving their algorithm and stop raising some bullshit issues.
Tragetting paid links is not taking anyone anywhere..

 

Uh-huh.... You mean "innocent webmasters" who are buying links? You mean the "bullshit issue" of continuing to target people who try to scam Google rankings?

Targeting paid links is certainly not taking anyone buying paid links anywhere, but it may well help people who are playing by the rules and not buying links hoping for a fast elevator ride to page 1.

 

I have a few websites and almost 70% of my traffic is from Google, when Google sends 600 users, MSN or Yahoo send 10 users, so I have two options, make my self ban from Google or accept their TOS.

 

You are making a faulty assumption there, namely that anyone purchasing a link is doing so the scam the listings, and anyone not paying isn't. This is faulty because, on average, people spending tens or hundreds of dollars a month on link advertising tend to have better quality sites. There are many exceptions each way of course, but someone who has to shell out money they might not get back is generally more careful about the quality of site they are submitting.

 

No. I'm not making a faulty assumption at all. I have tried throughout this thread to distinguish between buying links for ADVERTISING and buying links for PAGERANK.

Nobody, including Google, objects to the former. Many people, including Google, object to the latter. And that's what this thread - and Cutts' blog post - is all about: Preventing the latter from artifically inflating PR and Google rankings.

 

If the site is quality and relevant to the search performed, why is it a problem if the site appears high in the rankings? Far better to try and screen out the irrelevant garbage that does damage the search listings, and most of which never bothers paying for a link in the first place.

I am not saying that all sites that use free links are bad; there are, after all, some very good sites out there that have never purchased advertising of any sort, never mind paid for link advertising.

 

And the 'no follow' tag is just another tool in the SEO's toolbox for SE manipulation, er 'non-manipulation' lol.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/04/28/wikipedia-special-treatment-for-wikia-and-other-wikis/

 

I don't know if it's a coincidence but most of my website pages that have fairly non-unique content but do contain adsense - have gone from pr0 to pr3. Whereas my totally unique & regularly updated main pages that don't have google ads, have had no pr improvement worthy of reporting! I hope it's just an unfortunate coincidence ...otherwise I shall definitely be dropping google. I have a set of principles that I actually like to adhere to! & not associating with a bunch of hypocrites is near the top of the list!

I think if google genuinely wants to improve search results - they should work on some algo that considers how long unique visitors stay on any given web page. Nobody hangs around on spammy useless websites after all - and the more relevant that webpage is to the user ... the more time they spend there.

But then how do you get visitors?

By exchanging and/or buying links of course duh!

Why doesn't Matt Butt just appeal to general internet users to report these spammy naff websites instead of trying to get them to report whether they have paid links or not?? How is an average internet user supposed to figure that one out??

He's deliberately winding up the webmaster & seo community in my opinion? It's preposterous.

 

Thats fine, but some sites are useful just because you can quickly find what you are looking for and leave!

Rant: I constantly read on forums that the really valuable back-links to get for your sites google ranking are on-topic/on-theme links. If thats true how come they are so worried about all those off topic spammy paid links messing up their SERPS?

 

True, and of course other considerations have to be ummm considered
To be honest, I don't think I give a sh*t anymore. I was getting much better visitor/purchase ratio before I started reading and believing half of the seo info on this forum ... then getting hooked on buying & creating links & then worrying about PR... bollo*ks to it all!

Sure, I have a vast improvement in traffic now, but it's useless traffic! apart from adsense click-throughs doubling every month. But that's not what I'm interested in.

Yeah that's a good point! Why are they counting them now?

 

I think you just answered your own question. That's what it's all about - giving more weight to on-topic relevant links and less to crap links, especially those that are bought and sold.

And that's why Google and most people who actually know what they're talking about keep repeating that you should be building and optimizing your websites for visitors and not for SE spiders. If you follow that advice instead of all the get rich quick overnight schemes and Google myths and other half-baked or just plain moronic ideas that fill up threads on forums like this one, the reality is that you'll do quite well in time.

Build for the long term, not the short term. That's probably what you were doing before you got sucked into what the "forum experts" have fed you.

 

Thanks for that It all gets a bit confusing Today, I'm starting to realise spending too much time on attempting seo or serps has wasted a lot of my limited brain power, a lot of my money, and most importantly - my focus.

 

For those interested, here's another take on when a paid link may be okay and when it's just a bad idea:

Buying Links? Make Sure You Have a Well-Rounded Link Profile