If I were rich and could buy a link with appealing anchor text on, for example, CNN's front page, why would that be "wrong"? It would surely drive tons of traffic to my site, regardless of PageRank issues. Would that be a "wrong" motive? I think not. In a capitalistic free market, it might be a wise business decision.
Yes and no - it is all about relevance. If the CNN link was to a dog biscuit wholesaler in England, the traffic, whilst high - would be crap
Hmm, you think all those highly-paid Ph.D.'s, engineers, and linguistics experts working on the algorithm are incapable of doing that?
Jim, trust me, it's pointless to even try talking with him. I don't know if it's a lack of psych meds or perhaps too many, but either way it's no use. That isn't meant to be an insult, either. I honestly think that perhaps he has a few problems that most of us cannot really relate to. -Michael
Is it just my imagination, or do I detect a pattern here? • Google seems to be taking a stand against paid-links-for-PR. • Some DP posters strongly assert that Google is incapable of making an algorithm that will catch such paid links. • A large percentage of such posters are themselves directory owners and/or sellers of paid links. One might say that they have a "vested interest" in depreciating Google's algorithmic capabilities.
Yes, many believe they should be allowed to earn revenue from cheating and manipulating pagerank and SERPs, cause thats what text links in all reality do. +REP for this excellent post.
Are you stalking me??? as you missed mikeys post Last word to you Your buddy mikey does not know this though. The two of you should sit and analyze how you both like to seem like you know everything yet seem too dense to determine who posted what.... You both need a shrink... I have a christmas present coming for you.. Keep your eyes on Adwords Ads for keywords related to your site ZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
+REP for making me laugh my butt off at work AND getting my boss to give me the "WTF is going on" glare
Jim, I don't own a directory (well, not an active one, anyways) and I made one stab at selling tla's, but since I never really marketed it that kind of flopped as well. My contention is not that they cannot identify paid links. Mine is that they cannot algorithmically do it with anything resembling an acceptable degree accuracy. Hell, I doubt that they could really even do that by hand. Plus, they have much worse problems to deal with, from a sector of spammers that would never stoop so low as to rank by paying anything. This crusade they are on will never touch the ones who can really afford to buy rankings, such as the major mortgage or news firms, or the ones who use the shotgun build em and burn em approach to websites. It is really only going to affect those poor webmasters in the middle who buy text links just to stay in the game. Hell, with the amount of spam out there some people have to buy text links just to stay out of the supplemental index. -Michael
Precisely. The DP Directories Forum is filled with other examples of this head-in-the-sand form of denial, for the same reasons. Do you know the meaning of narcissism, Sem? Or egocentricity? http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showpost.php?p=5502895&postcount=29 Why would I argue with that? It's correct. Bots are simple creatures that follow links and send data back to Google, where the data analysis is performed. Apparently, you know as much about bots as you do about algorithms.