HUGE site caught selling text links - Will Google penalize them?

If the statement you quoted were true then you might have a point... but Google cannot "do whatever they want with their search engine"... it is a business (and a publicly traded one at that), and as such is governed by those laws and regulations pertaining to all businesses. There are rules that they must abide by, principles and codes of ethics that they need to follow, practices that they need to adhere to.

True, they will get away with more than most, because so many people will take the lie down and roll over attitude that you have... but there are still limits to what they can get away with.

-Michael

 

They aren't telling you that you can't buy or sell links, they are just telling you that -- if you do -- they won't rank you well.

Do restaurants get to demand that the critics rank them highly, even if their discourteous staff delivers tasteless food out of filthy kitchens? No, of course not.

Google is a web site rating service. You won't win by trying to get the government for force Google to give you better ratings.

 

Assuming the links haven't been nuked by Google they are great value.

Most of the pages rank top in google and have no link spots sold yet. There are loads of pages with links being sold on.

http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/blog/howstuffworks-selling-links/

 

They've been selling links for years.

That's a very poor analogy. Think more along the lines of the critic cannot tell the restaurant that it cannot buy wine from a particular vineyard or the critic will trash the restaurant across the board.

This has nothing to do with Google trashing crappy sites, now does it? No. It has to do with Google trashing perfectly fine sites, because those sites won't do business with each other they way Google tells them to. That is plain wrong.

Who said anything about them having to rank me better? I'm saying they cannot arbitrarily penalize based on this.

-Michael

 

It's not arbitrary. It's their search engine and their rules.

They publish their standards, "We like pages like X and we don't like pages like Y."

It's their right to define their own criteria -- actually it's their job to define their own criteria.

Can you imagine a government-run search engine?

 

Yeah... but that has nothing to do with whether or not someone accepts money in return for an endorsement. So, not sure what your point is.

If Google says "link to a crappy site and you will get penalized", which it is my understanding that they do, that is totally within their rights.

If Google says, "accept money for something, without doing it in exactly the manner we tell you to, and we will smack you like an unwanted redheaded stepchild", then that violates anti-trust laws.

All Google has to do is step up the Link Recursion Depth for linking out to bad neighborhoods, be open and honest with the fact that was what they were doing, and the damn problem would solve itself. Editorial review of who people link to would increase naturally.

-Michael

 

oops! can't open the url of that site.