Pretty good interview with Adam. Adam's response to this question and many more follow...check it out.
He makes some interesting points about a site's "crawl budget". That's a really good argument for ensuring that you don't let Google spider any duplicate content.
excellent read, especially about the crawl budget and some clarification on link sales. thank you for posting.
EXCELLENT! Thx for bringing this information top light! I have Highlighted a few of the comments that NOW explain better what matt cutts (the drama king) was trying to say.... But, on the reassuring side, we've had some people voice concerns "what happens if my competitor decides to report my pages, even though they are completely following the webmaster guidelines. Is some action going to be taken?" The answer to that is definitively not, because this does not lead directly into an action pipeline, but rather it is used only for review. It is not going to directly or adversely affect any pages or sites that are following the webmaster guidelines. The problem is that we've seen quite a bit of buying and selling for the very clear purpose of transferring PageRank. Some times we see people out there saying "hey, I've got a PR8 site" and, this will give you some great Google boost, and I am selling it for just three hundred a month. Well, that's blunt, and that's clearly in violation of the "do not engage in linking schemes that are not permitted within the webmaster guidelines". Two, taking a step back, our goal is not to catch one hundred percent of paid links. It's to try to address the egregious behavior of buying and selling the links that focus on the passing of PageRank. That type of behavior is a lot more readily identifiable then I think people give us credit for. Those comments tell the whole story... thx malcolm
It's a dead giveaway when a lot of link sales explicitly mention the PR of the page the link will be on. How many paid directories make no mention of their PR? So, kudos to the guys at Google for knowing how to read.
Crawl budget. Now that's an interesting concept. I never heard that term before. Damn yahoo's crappy statistics. I don't want to put google's analytics on my site, but I might have to just to see how I'm being spidered. I haven't had a problem with google in over 2 years now, but it still keeps me awake at night