Hidden links

Nice to see they're making strides in improving their algorithm. Nothing wrong with weeding out crappy "paid" sites.

 

And all those link clouds with cheap permanent links... this is the real meaning of the word 'permanent'.

 

I think the devaluing of what Google perceives to be paid links will be the way they go - with something like think when are aren't 100% sure of the authenticity of the link it might be a bit much for them to opt to penalise site algorithmically.

I find it hard to believe Google would plan to use such reports to manually ban or penalise sites. I think for the large part they will be using them to find commonalities between the sites so they can find the best solution algorithmically. When you are dealing with the scale that Google deals with doing anything manually is ridiculous.

LOL you'd only reports links if you weren't employing the practice yourself - - LOL I'd like to think all use DP members are as thick as theives!



Meh - for the large part I'm not too worried I mean I personally have always look to only allow relevant advertisers to advertise on my sites, and not just because I didn't want to be deceptive or manipulate Google's search ranks, but because to be completely honest people running sites within your own industry will pay more to have a link on your site because of the direct traffic from the link PLUS there is greater PR transfer when links are from relevant sources and your users actually find the links interesting, so it's a win-win for everyone. That said I don't know if my text link advertisers will be stoked with the idea of me adding no follows on their links. It will be very interesting to see how those conversations go...

I definitely think Google might look into devaluing links that appear around or after certain words. They might also look to devalue links that appear in link lists, or one after the other and links that appear in footers.

I post this in another thread:

Personally I think Matt's mission of removing all "paid links" is probably going to be a lost cause in terms of eliminating the practice all together. I mean SEM isn't going to stop over night and I think for the large part he is just blowing smoke up people's asses to scare them into stopping the practice, because I think Google are probably a long way off from convincingly eliminating the problem, and having listened to Adam Lasnik at a search conference recently I don't think Google is necessarily trying to eliminate all paid links - they are probably more leaning towards eliminating paid links that have the primary purpose of search engine manipulation, being links purchased for PR and with specific anchor text etc.

I mean if you look at it from Google's perspective I think they will probably look into how are most of the search manipulating paid links are bought and positioned and look to diminish the value of such links and potential penalise the sites that are employing the technique from both ends.

I mean the obvious thing that stands out to me is the fact that paid link spam for the large part appears at the bottom of pages.

If I were Google, and I'm sure they are, that is the area I'd be going after you'd probably get 70% of the "paid links that have intent to manipulate SERPs" this way. How? simply just devaluing the value of links lower in pages are removed from content. Far from difficult and sure there is probably some legitimate links that are placed lower on pages, but it's not Google's role to provide the prefect search results they are just out there to do the best they can and sometimes that means a couple of the innocent will probably get a couple of bumps and bruises along the way. Plus if they primarily just "devalue" links in footers they won't really be penalising anyone - they just wont' be passing on the rewards of the link.

I mean site owners need to keep a balance of keeping users happy and making a few dollars on the side. That is what was beautiful about selling text links at the bottom of sites - they were out of the way of users so they didn't really care and if you had high PR you really could make a tidy amount of money selling a few links, and the links didn't hurt the primary purpose of the site whilst still being of great value to advertisers.

I mean I obviously don't work at Google and I don't know if they are already employing this but if they were savvy they'd just devalue links that appear close to the bottom of the page and especially site's displaying links that aren't in context with their sites, like a sports site promoting Viagra... I mean derr - "paid link" but to a large extent I think the value of irrelevant inbound links is already fairly diminished.

That's what I think Google will do, if they aren't already, and if they could properly implement something like that it probably would tackle a good 70% of the problem in my opinion.

 

I second that, the results of manual 'submission' by people would be just a junk. This would start another 'paid business' - you all can guess on what.

 

Scary stuff on the surface, but I agree with many people here in that it will only hinder things, not make them better.

 

Probably they wont do something that will give them more job to do and difficult to identify. those job need to do manual and go to site by site to check the link. yeah they might do it but the one who would be penalized would be very lucky like won a lottery XD