I hate using custom email forms, and I usually simply refuse to use them. You have NO RECORD of what you sent. It is as if you did not send it at all. Sucks. So the next time you try to ram your email form down my throat, don't expect any response. It's not MY JOB to help you avoid spam, by burdening me with a black hole. I made an exception to my own rule, and sent an email to Text-Link-Ads. "Please fill out the form below and a Text Link Ads representative will get RIGHT BACK to you." NOT! Nobody home. Silence. Liars. Reconstructing, it went something like this - "Dear Text-Link-Ads, You system looks very good, but I have one question. In light of the recent Jagger update, regarding sites being heavily penalized for buying links, would you please comment on this. I don't suppose "no follow" tags would work for you? Thank you very much, Me" The silence has been deafening. If they can't even comment, it must be really bad. Then again, maybe they didn't get my email. Yeah, right. I can only conclude that it's true - BUYING LINKS will cause Google to kick your butt - bye-bye high ranking. After all, Google even SAYS SO. I have never sought out links, and Jagger didn't touch me (knock on wood, or simulated veneer). .
The last 2 posts are from people trying to build up enough posts for a link in their signture If I can translate the post: "Email forms suck" "Don't buy links cos Google will kick ya ass" Am I right? Darren
I did find that Text Link Ads is not always good about answering emails promptly. Is that still an issue?
"If I can translate the post: "Email forms suck" "Don't buy links cos Google will kick ya ass" YES! Exactly. Although the email form rant wasn't necessary. It just piffes me off, that I have to write important emails in Word first, so that I can have a copy. In this case, I didn't do Word first, so I had to reconstruct (guess) at what I had written. Sorry if I muddied the waters, by trying to kill two birds with one stone. The links at the bottom of my post are not "purchased". They are my own links to my own pages. I wasn't saying that links are bad, just PURCHASED links!
I've often wondered how anyone, other than yourself and the site you purchased links from, would know they were purchased? If the two sites in question are of a related theme, why would there even be an issue. Maybe I'm just thick.
Well, only some days a Google rep announced that they would have means to detect bought links as well as other link building schemes... how much we can trust such statements is another question of course. Anyway, the same rep also said Google would never penalize such links, but only not value them at all. This doesn't make buying links a bad advertising tool though (because your goal for advertising should be to drive traffic to your site), if anything it makes it a bad SEO tool.
Thanks for the explination. This sounds like a major disinformation campaign to me on the part of google. The only way I can see this working would be to devalue all links from higher pr sites to lower pr sites. Interesting none the less.
Allthough I have no idea how they would possibly do this, I don'T believe they would simply devalue all high PR links to low PR sites, as this would effect all natural links too and not only the small percentage of sold links. The article I read about this stuff can be found here btw.
Google is algorithmically trying to identify paid links, there is no question about this. MattCutts: (full post here: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/text-links-and-pagerank/) The question is how good a job can they do? And what are the criteria they are using to identify such links? Some obvious ideas that pop into my head are: A series of links preceded by identifying words such as "sponsored," "paid," "advertising," and other such words (see quote below). Links to gambling and/or pharmacy sites mixed in with a bunch of other links in a format consistent with that typically used for purchased ads. Lists of links to outside sites in footer locations. Anyway those are just some of my guesses of things Google could be doing to recognize paid links. There are (of course) others that I haven't thought of. One other part of Matt's post I found revealing was:
This seems discriminatory on it's face. Google is saying "Site 1, you seem like a reputable site, so you have our blessing to monitize your site and sell all the links you want, however site 2, we don't like your site, so if you sell a link we will penalize your site into oblivion." I'm of the opinion google has trouble detecting paid links and therefore is trying to "scare" webmasters into not doing it. It solves the problem of them having to tweak the algo to take care of the "problem" sites. Using the nofollow tag is another way google has of passing the buck to webmasters. For google to question why someone is linking to you would be analogous to them asking why someone gave you a green sweater instead of a blue one for Christmas. Google doesn't like green sweaters, so they penalize you. It doesn't matter that the webmaster linking to you may have actually found your site to be a valuable resource for his visitors (and you actually look better in green than blue ). I can understand being able to track link networks such as the coop and linkvault and not giving weight to those links. To devalue links because "We don't understand why site x would link to site Y" is just silly at best.