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Google Speaks on Links

Discussion in 'Link Development' started by Atlanta Realtor, Jul 26, 2004.

  1. #1
    Here is a great thread which most of you know I have been screaming about LOL..but I think this might or hope that it will shed some light on googles opinion of link buying and selling. I am sure there will be some here that will disregard this as just plain google misdirection, but those would probably be those that sell links..So let the Flaming Begin ;) It seems this was an email someone recieved because they were drop from google and wanted to know why.

    Hi Name Deleted,

    Thank you for your reply. Unfortunately, we are unable to send personal
    responses to all of the requests we receive to review individual website
    content. Websites can fall out of our index for many reasons, including
    penalization.

    Certain actions such as buying or selling links to increase a site's
    PageRank value
    or cloaking - writing text in such a way that it can be
    seen by search engines but not by users - can result in penalization.
    Please review our quality guidelines at
    http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html for more information. If
    the webmaster identifies problems with the website and makes the changes
    necessary to comply with these guidelines, please do not hesitate to
    contact us.

    We are sorry that we cannot provide individual assistance at this
    time.

    Regards,
    The Google Team

    Now if this email is true we have in googles own words their opinion of buying and selling links.
     
    Atlanta Realtor, Jul 26, 2004 IP
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  2. digitalpoint

    digitalpoint Overlord of no one Staff

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    #2
    That's really nothing new though... It's pretty common knowledge that buying/selling links (especially for purpose of PageRank boosting) is "frowned upon" by search engines.
     
    digitalpoint, Jul 26, 2004 IP
  3. Atlanta Realtor

    Atlanta Realtor Peon

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    #3
    I know it nothing new but I have never seen an email from google pertaining to this subject. Its funny this person gets an email from google talking about link buying and selling but I havent yet and I have sent google a ton of emails ..LOL

    Since my website was drop from the serps. I felt all along it was because of link buying but had no hardcore proof that it could be from that. I think now after seeing this email there is some proof that it was. IMHO

    Plus what other use is there really for link buying. When some Seo's place clients on non related websites that have no real value to the link purchaser other then to increase PR then wouldnt you agree it is misleading that buyer and putting their website in harms way?
     
    Atlanta Realtor, Jul 26, 2004 IP
  4. vprp

    vprp Peon

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    #4
    Are you saying your SEO company bought links for you and this may have caused your site to be penalized? I guess it really depends. If the SEO firm discussed with you how they would go about your link building campaign (not buying text links) and went ahead and did it, then it would be misleading.
     
    vprp, Jul 26, 2004 IP
  5. compar

    compar Peon

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    #5
    The problem I have with this is establishing the difference between buying links to accumulate PR and legitmate advertising.

    Webmasters and internet marketers have been purchasing banner placements for years. All banners are link. Where do you want your banners placed? On high traffic site, right? What is the one characteristic of a high traffic site? High PR, correct. So is Google now going to "penalize" sites who buy banner placements?

    Now I know the next argument is going be the one about links from non relevant pages -- these could only be there to attract PR, right? Not Necessarily. In marketing there is something called demographics. As a marketer you decide that your target market is a certain segment of the population based on age, or gender, or education, annual income etc. So if you can find a web site that caters to this demographic, even thought the specific product has nothing to do with your site, it would still be legitimate to advertise on this web site.

    Let's say you are a travel agent interested in booking honeymoon trips. It would be perfectly legitmate for you to advertise on a high traffic wedding apparel web site. So relevance to the advertiser maybe totally different than relevance to the search engines. The relevance may well be the demographic of the web site and not the content.

    So I would agree that Google doesn't like anything that might be an outright attempt to manipulate their results. But like a lot of the other things it doesn't like I think the will have a hard time identifying it and be very slow to do anything about it.
     
    compar, Jul 26, 2004 IP
  6. I. Brian

    I. Brian Business consultant

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    #6
    I quite agree, Bob - Google has dug itself into something of a hole on the issue.

    They've done as much as they could to convince the webmastering community to accept that pages have a certain arbitrary value. However, Google refuse to allow webmasters to publicly use this information in advertising.

    It's sort of like the Tourist Board giving hotels star ratings, and encouraging consumers to look for the star rating on hotels - but penalising hotels that actually reference this value to their consumers.

    The idea that buying or selling links is equivalent to cloaking, though, is a pretty severe statement - and in my opinion, particularly greivous. Cloaking is an attempt to deceive search engines - text link ads is a legitimate form of advertising.

    Heck, Google is doing it's best to pay people for linking to Google via the websearch interface.
     
    I. Brian, Jul 26, 2004 IP
  7. Atlanta Realtor

    Atlanta Realtor Peon

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    #7
    Compar I agree with your statements however most seo's ..NOT all suggest buying links to help optimize a website to manipulate the serps. If you were to take an HONEST poll and ask seo's why they would have their clients buy links it would be overwhelming in favor of serp manipulation.

    To pay say $500 per month for a non relevant PR 7 link in hopes to drive more traffic is just a waste of money. I know in my profession if I wanted traffic from a website I could take that same $ 500 and spend it to drive real traffic to my website that would produce good leads. It wouldnt have the same benefit from that PR 7 link for serp manipulation but it would drive more targeted traffic to my website.

    How relevant would say a website on Mars be to a real estate website for relevant traffic in Atlanta or even a Tool website be for driving traffic to a real estate website. The only purpose for those types of links are to manipulate. This is something google could see a thousand miles away.

    IMHO I see google cracking down on this. Whether it is by algo or reporting , who can say. It would also seem to me that with the statement of google saying either buying or selling tells me this is something they want to get rid of.

    Look at it from a financial point of view. If google can prevent purchased links from helping websites that buy them..that opens more income to their adwords program or so they may hope.

    There are some Seo's that may suggest buying links for the purpose of driving traffic but the main reason which I am sure we all can agree is to manipulate the serps because it WAS easy to do until now.

    Now on the flip side of this coin. It is like someone has said, If google cracks down on purchased links to manipulate..whats to prevent your competitors from going out and placing your link on other sites to get you penalized. If google doesnt have a control for that then we are going to see more and more websites penalized by others trying to sabotage their competitors.

    IMHO
     
    Atlanta Realtor, Jul 26, 2004 IP
  8. Owlcroft

    Owlcroft Peon

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    #8
    Though I say this a lot, the whole problem flows from the fundamentally--and I mean fundamentally--flawed idea that is the entire base on which Google, with most or all of the others, is based: that backlinks are a good measure of anything.

    The entire concept of "Page Rank" is essentially a surrender--a throwing up of the hands in admission that the SE is unable to do a reliable relevance determination solely from on-page elements. But if on-page elements are tricky because subject to manipulation, whetever in God's cosmos possessed anyone of the batty notion that somehow linkage would be exempt from any such manipulation? As we have seen for years, it is every bit as manipulable as on-page content--and, I argue, more so, because a clever group ought, with the benefit of hindsight if nothing else, today be able to make pretty reliable filters to screen on-page manipulation.

    The other day, I heard an expert discussing national security and terrorism. As he pointed out, and the lesson applies equally here, the foolish way to go about things is to look for a perfect or near-perfect "magic bullet" scfreening method. What in reality works very well is the application of a modest number of independent screenings, even when they are individually only so-so.

    If the filters, or tests, are really independent methods, their chances of catching a nasty are correspondingly independent. Now if I apply a test that catches, say 80% of the nasties, that's not very good: 1 in 5 will get by me. If I now, though, apply a second filter also of, say again 80% effectiveness, all of a sudden my overall efficiency is 96%, and a nasty has only 1 chance in 25 of getting by my dual filtering. Put just a third 80% filter in place, and fewer than 1%--1 in 125--nasties will creep past my defences.

    I refuse to believe that Google's gaggle of Phuds could not come up with a half dozen or so independent algorithmic tests for nontrivial on-page manipulation or artificiality. But if they could, then the whole argument for "PR" is out the window.

    Using backlinks for weighting a page's significance has a fairly obvious and evil feedback effect. Excellent sites on a topic that are not much-linked to begin with will continue to lose ground to sites that are well-linked, regardless of those linked sites' real quality, because PR has an inertial effect: them as has gets, and them as hasn't don't. (You could construct some hypothetical scenarios to demonstrate this effect, but really, that shouldn't be necessary, it's so obvious.)

    So the sites that get high placement are sites that have the knowledge and the cold, hard cash to go out and get strong backlinks. Amateurs, ignorant of SEO and in any event with fairly limited time and means, will have their sites widely viewed by friends and neighbors, and scarcely at all by anyone else, no matter how supremely relevant and informative those sites.

    That, in a word, sucks.

    Now Google is doing what car makers have spent decades doing with the internal-combustion engine: sticking doodad on top of doohickey in attempts to try to make an inherently inferior and defective type of engine run tolerably. They not only want to use links as a measure, they want to play with the "relevance" of those links. As compar rightly pointed out, there is nothing whatever obvious about a large number of links that are, for one reason or another, justly "relevant".

    Besides the demographic sorts of ties, there are is we might call "local-context" relevance. If I have a page on science in Antarctica, it might contain a brief paragraph on early polar expeditions, and therein have a parenthetical link to a site on 19th-century sailing ships. Are 19th-century saling ships "relevant" to science in Antarctica? I cannot imagine the algo that would produce a "Yes" answer, yet, as you see, that link would belong perfectly well where it is, and would be "relevant" in the context.

    Soon or late, someone a little smarter than a couple of college kids will settle down to doing a real job of assaying page relevance, and then will do to Google what Google did to everyone else when it started out, during that brief, halcyon period before professional webmasters discovered the gas G's engine runs on.
     
    Owlcroft, Jul 26, 2004 IP
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  9. anthonycea

    anthonycea Banned

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    #9
    House of cards? I do not think anyone wants me to start, right?

    Just a little, toolbars, page rank gauges, buying and selling of links, Google SERP's, traffic redirection to Adsense, Adwords = house of cards.

    Thank you for watching, tune in again next week for more of the same. :eek:
     
    anthonycea, Jul 28, 2004 IP
  10. Mel

    Mel Peon

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    #10
    IMO Google takes little notice of PR when ranking sites, and its relevancy ranking algorithim would seem to be as good as anyone else's, but there is an Urban Legend out there that the PR of the page the link is from affects the ranking, and I think that Google are happy to perpetuate that legend so long as it keeps the spotlight off the rest of the algo. They do a fair job of providing relevant results, especially when you consider that they have thousands of dedicated and skilled individuals working hard to try to beat their algorithm.

    I may or may not be correct but my clients sites still rank well despite my ignoring the PR of the page the links are from.

    There is a bigger issue IMO and that is the buying of anchor text links, but since Google is one of the biggest purveyors of advertising on webpages, it seems to me that its going to be kind of hard to police those who say they want to buy "Ads" themselves on others pages.
     
    Mel, Jul 29, 2004 IP
  11. iShopHQ

    iShopHQ Peon

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    #11
    And how's Google to know whether it's a link you paid for or an organic link?
     
    iShopHQ, Jul 29, 2004 IP
  12. Atlanta Realtor

    Atlanta Realtor Peon

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    #12

    One way that I know of is ..lets say you have a website that sells tennis rackets and your link is on a website that is about the Mars Planet Mission..lol I dont think it would be hard to prove that the link is meant to manipulate their results.
     
    Atlanta Realtor, Jul 29, 2004 IP
  13. Mel

    Mel Peon

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    #13
    Its not so much the technical expertise required to do something as the ability to do it in such a way that they can still serve the 150 million searches per day in less than half a second.
    It is often assumed that it is a snap to change the algo to do anything wanted, but the reality is that if in doing so it now takes 5 times longer to provide results, you have to have five times more equipment to serve the same results, and how many searchers are going to wait five seconds for the results when everyone else serves them up in half a second.
     
    Mel, Jul 29, 2004 IP
  14. compar

    compar Peon

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    #14
    But that is exactly what I was talking about with demographics. How do you know that there wasn't a market survey done, that showed that the majority of Americans who are interested in Mars exploration, are upper middle class university educated people, with an average annual family income of $125,000? And that this just happens to be the exact demographic of the weekend tennis player.

    The answer is that you don't, and neither does Google. A link bought on this site may be a perfectly legitimate attempt at advertising to the tennis playing public?

    From an advertising point of view relevance doesn't have to be content. It may be an effort to reach a specific audience.
     
    compar, Jul 29, 2004 IP
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  15. Voyager

    Voyager Guest

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    #15
    Is it not correct that Google AdWords ads use JavaScript, and are therefore not seen as links for the purposes of PR and anchor text?
     
    Voyager, Jul 29, 2004 IP
  16. Mel

    Mel Peon

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    #16
    Yes its true that Google adwords ads do not give you the value of a recognized link by Google, but IMO that is not very relevant to the buying of other ads on other sites.
     
    Mel, Jul 29, 2004 IP
  17. tphyahoo

    tphyahoo Peon

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    #17
    What a google wants...

    -- Google wants to make money. That means adwords. (96% of income is adwords.)
    -- Right column adword clicks are driven by left-column "organics." If the organics decrease in quality, people will start searching elsewhere and there will be fewer clicks on right-side adwords.

    So how to keep the organics "pure" against seo spam? Reward websites (professional seo or not) that help google make good organics. Punish websites that pollute the organics.

    But this strategy is failing. What seems to happen is google keeps trying and trying, but when they change the algorithm all that happens is they punish one group of seo who made the wrong prediction about the way the algos were heading, and they reward another group that predicted right, whether because they were smarter or pure luck.

    So far so obvious...
     
    tphyahoo, Jul 30, 2004 IP
  18. tphyahoo

    tphyahoo Peon

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    #18
    After many moons, years, cloaking is still an effective strategy to spam google. This would be comparatively easy to stop, compared to stopping anchor text spam. Stopping anchor text spam involves complicated algo.

    Stopping cloaking only requires setting up a few thousand more stealth crawlers that stop check the results from the googlebot. If the stealth crawler gets a different page, punish the page. Pure brute force, no computer geniuses required. Maybe google is doing this, but it must be on a very small scale, because cloaking still works.

    Right? (Correct me if I'm wrong, please. I know there are people more expert than me on the forum.)

    So, maybe google just doesn't care. Not about cloaking. And therefore certainly not about anchor spam, which is harder to stop. Well they care, but not urgently enough to go out and buy enough boxes to do the steal spider thing. They just want to have enough of a filter in place to keep SEO community guessing. Plenty gets through the filter, but that's okay, as long as SEO community focuses on what doesn't get through the filter.

    Because why? SEO focused on what the filter going to do next means, seo charge big fees to do their work. That means some potential seo customers will decide, screw this, we'll just buy adwords instead.

    Self licking icecream cone.
     
    tphyahoo, Jul 30, 2004 IP
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  19. tphyahoo

    tphyahoo Peon

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    #19
    Originally Posted by iShopHQ

    "And how's Google to know whether it's a link you paid for or an organic link?"

    From http://www.textlinkbrokers.com/faq.html :

    "How does the whole process work of buying text links from Textlinkbrokers?

    The first thing you do is contact us to tell us what you are looking for. If you dont know what you are looking for we will be happy to help you figure out what you need. We will then find out what link text and URL you want to use. We then place your link(s) on a site that meets your requirements. Once your link is up we will show you where it is located. If you are satisfied you sign an insertion order and pay for the link with paypal or a credit card. If you are not satisfied we will move it to a new site or make any changes desired. YOU DONT PAY UNTIL YOU GET WHAT YOU WANT."

    Right! You don't pay until you get what you want! Perfect!

    Okay. So google could hire some of those famous third world citizens that click on ads for a penny an hour, and have them pose as link buyers from the various "link dealers" that are using pagerank to market their product. After all, they don't even have to pay to get the link. Take a few months, put together a blacklist, and PUNISH. Hey, maybe you could even write a robot that did this.

    No, I am not 100% serious. But... if links are bad... like drugs are bad... why not? Link narcs.

    I guess the reason why not is it would anger enough people that it might put G out of business, G needs all the good will they can right now. But hey, maybe the principal is sound and google is just trying to figure out a sneakier way to do it.
     
    tphyahoo, Jul 30, 2004 IP
  20. tphyahoo

    tphyahoo Peon

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    #20
    All right, I was just kidding about the link narcs.

    Google doesn't need to punish link buying, they just need to make sure that their adword program is economically competitive with text link buying.

    What google needs to do is hire a team of very smart people -- business people, not programmers (or a mix) -- and figure out, how much does it cost to capitalize pagerank. By "pagerank", I don't mean the specific number on the Gbar, I mean the seo community's imprecise, schroedinger equation sort of perception of what a backlink from a page is worth.

    G is not starting from scratch. They have a lot of economic data from their adwords program. So they could what if analysis, like: a backlink from page x would raise serp on good words by y amount, bringing in additional z traffic (they have all that G bar information, plus the google cookie for all clicks). How much would it cost to bring in additional z traffic by buying adwords? Well, if bringing in the plus z with a back link costs a lot less than the adwords solution, then google is in trouble.

    Never mind about the integrity of the "organic" left side results, which was always a vague concept. If link buying to manipulate left side serps is significantly cheaper than the adwords for the right side alternative, this threatens their business model. It rewards people that do business the "sneaky" way, and punishes people that buy adwords. That's bad.

    G will either do something about this or they are in trouble.

    So maybe my link narc idea wasn't so crazy after all. Only, instead of using narcs to compile a blacklist, G will have people posing as buyers as part of a sophisticated market research program to determine how their adwords compete with backlink buying for brining in traffic. Maybe a team of college interns posing as link buyers, to try and put together some statistics on what links cost on average? Is it worth it to google to do this? It's just a guess, but I think maybe yes. Anyway, interns are cheap.

    (Hey! Maybe I could sell them on this... G is hiring...)

    Google says they reserve the right to punish people who buy links for the purposes of manipulating serps, but as compar rightly argued, this is hogwash. What they will do is attempt to make link buying a less attractive alternative to adwords/adsense.

    This would also argue against the theory that you could mess with your competitors by linking to them in a way that looks to google like spam/bought links/call it what you will.

    A consequence of this is, if my theory is correct, and you are having good results with link buying (compared to adwords), your results may start getting less good as google recalibrates. You will start having to buy more links, from heavier weighted pages that will charge you more, to achieve the results that you are used to.

    Results from text link buying can be allowed to be a little cheaper on average, to reward the risk, but not too much.

    (Adwords is tried and true, you know what you're going to get on a a real basis. Text link buying is more of a "speculative" investment. Maybe it'll work great, but then again maybe not, either way you have to wait a while for the results to kick in, and if it's not working you only get the chance to cut your losses once a month (at textlinkbrokers anyway). If you have a lot of experience and good instinct, you can spot a "good buy" but it's always a gamble.)

    This is a variation on the "conspiracy theory" that adwords and organics aren't as separated by the chinese wall as google claims. (Chinese wall? http://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/chinesewall.asp) I guess I am beginning to join the conspiracy crowd.
     
    tphyahoo, Jul 30, 2004 IP