Matt Cutts and the paid links

and you guys all wonder why i'm a black hat that spams google, yahoo, and msn. They don't care about you guys, they just care about the almighty dollar. Screw them. I'm going to go pump out a few hundred more spam domains. Our new stuff is almost impossible to detect (the sentences and grammar are better than most of the posts on here)

 

I hear you, sometimes it sucks to be 100 % white...

 

[tongue in cheek mode very firmly on] Do you think Matt has created this stir in a bid to stop people asking him when the next PR update is going to be? [ticm-off]

 

Hah... or a belated April Fool's....

 

The timing could be intended to dampen link sales before the PR update. If so, it would imply the PR update is more than a few days away.

 

do you think he sits back and laughs at the pot he stirs up?

 

Well what i guess is that Google actually trying to stop this Sponsored ads thing...actually one of my blog's PR went down frm PR5 to PR3...
So what i guess is that google don't want ppl to Buy Sell links to improve their Google PR!

Well bad news for webmasters

vib.

 

Well thats the reason google needs to do all these kinds of shits...bet well its up to you how you wanna use google!

But i can't say that this is wrong...coz i too use SEO to get good rankings in Google....which by the way google don't like...even if you are not doin Black Hat seo (like cloaking , doorway pages etc..)

So, it all comes at last that sometimes the webmasters/SEO will win, and sometimes the google will win(only for few days when they release a new algo etc..)

vib.

 

I can't see it working, people might not publicise as clearly that they're selling links, but that's about it - if you're discrete about it I don't see how Google could know what links are natural and which ones are paid.

 

IF people are actually scared G might be able to discern who to penalize and who not to, all it will do is drive UP the price for good links.

Just like any black market - you can't stamp it out, but the greater the risk, the greater the reward.

 

All links are paid... it's not like the Internet is free...

 

After reading all the replies here, I thought I'd post some thoughts of my own.

Recently it has become extremely hard to obtain links in a natural way, because everyone thinks they should get big bucks for every link they put on their blog that no one reads but them.
On the other hand, it leaves little choice (besides the social media networks and all the PR0 blogs who think they can ride the wave on your post if they blog about it). Those links aren't really worth a whole lot.

So to me its a chicken and egg problem (from two angles):

Because of the link purchase culture you cannot get free links and thus you have to buy links.

How do you rank a new site and get visitors in the first place? Lets face it, natural links can only happen if a lot of people see your site and how do you get them to your site, well write a stupid top 10 list and post it on Digg or buy links.

I am spinning in circles.

 

You know what? I don't like the idea Google is telling me what I may do for a living. My website is my website. I sell what I want there.

It is unbelievable how arrogant a multi billion $ company can be. The point is they want to penalize the way certain people making money... Which idea has two major faults:
-they are not any kind of authority
-I see nothing illegal in a business transaction between two website owners regarding text link advertisement.

What's next? Penalizing your website because there is YPN, PayPal payment link, or link to any MSN website?

 

ya, that nigga expects us to do all the sorting and reporting labor of manually deciding whats a paid link and what a real one. What's in it for us?

Seems like the only paid links and ads he wants is the ones done via Adwords or AdSense.

Not to mention everyone dry snitching on each other.

Worst. Idea. Ever.

 

No Google cannot tell you what to do and the WILL not tell you. They will just tell you what it takes to rank well and its totally up to them how they rank websites. As long as they can improve relevance to their users, thats all they care for.
Google has no obligation to rank you well and if you put links up for advertising, use a nofollow.

 

Google is the one who created this problem, first with PR and second by valuing links too greatly in their algorithm.

Let's face it, a lot of people prefer to use Google search. At one time, it was most likely to get your the search results you wanted.

But as with anything popular, it has become overrun. The search results are not nearly as quality as they were 5 years ago.

The jist is that Google wants us to make our sponsored links machine readable, meaning that we can link to provide traffic to a sponsor, but not PR.

Sounds like the issue with their algorithm is that it is unable to distinguish between quality links and bogus links when it comes to PR. Rather than overhaul their entire system, they want push us towards hosted solutions that survive through volume advertising rather than encourage us to build and host our own sites. They want to strip the small site owner of the opportunity to make money away from adsense.

The message being, it's ok to profit, as long as it is Google and any of their major publishing partners.

Now if they would invest in their core competency (search) and improve the weight of content, particularly readable (non-Markov'd) content they could clean up their SERPs substantially.

Now don't get me wrong. Smart people will exploit whatever changes they make to the SERPs as they have always done. Eventually the herd will follow and the methodology of ranking well will change again.

The internet is a frontier, and Google is a Gold Rush town that is booming. Sooner or later, there is will be no more gold to be found and people will move on to the next rush.

 

Google is coming to be a big monopoly. They want to sell links, they want to sell adwords, they want to drive Interent... But this is a problem for webmasters not for internet users..

Jakomo

 

You know whats next. Even more link buying!

Bought links will become more content centric to avoid detection. And those with a big enough budget will just buy even more links. Why, because a certain percentage of them may get detected.

If you need 100 links, then go and buy 200, assuming 50% (or whatever percentage) gets detected and devalued. And it will cost about the same anyways as the market price for links shifts to compensate accordingly.

This link buying issue does not concern me much, I barely ever use bought links for my clients (another story for some of my sites), BUT Google is about to open a big and very ugly can of worms.

 

it may happens you will buy 50 links instead of 100. but you will be sure about those 50, because you will buy them even more secretly (just don't negotiate through your gmail account and don't pay using google checkout ).

 

I wonder what will happen with Text Link Ad.