Who's Still Buying Links?

Google can not properly manage hidden text after 10 years one of my opponents has hidden text for more than 6 months and ranks well.How could they manage this.

 

Whats the URL to the competitior?

 

Plus Google will have to manually check each report. They already said they were overwhelmed when people began reporting each and every time they clicked on their own Adsense ad.

I highly doubt they would be able to check each and every report, let alone prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that someone was indeed selling links.

Not only that, but what if the "cheating" claims are wrong? Is Google going to show their reasoning in some sort of report? What about all those webmasters that notice a sudden drop in SERP? They email Matt Cutts and team, wait for a response, all the while their traffic drops dramatically. Would they have the right to sue Google or the people that reported them? What if they didn't do anything wrong in the first place?

 

I don't buy or sell links because I don't need to. I believe in mother nature being the best policy. That said, I have to say that I agree with an earlier point from Foxlore. To me, the bigger picture is Google getting their hands around the throat of the entire webmaster community and saying buy AdWords if you want links. Whether I am right or not I don't care, I am tired of watching Google bully webmasters around...we are the ones that put them in such a powerful position. Now they are trying strong-arm us with their little link rat patrol


Guezzz Googs find another way to rank sites that doesn't depend so much on links.

I agree that if site A links to site B in the same parent theme WTF is wrong with that? Whether it's paid, no follow or not...it's advertising.

Because Matt Cutts has called out to the webmasters "Please rat out paid links" tells me that this is hard to determine and detect by an algo. For Google to endorse the "rat" concept tells me where they are at. They need links to qualify site importance and ranking. That is something engineers need to look at to prevent threads like this one making assumptions. To me Google's combatting method reaks of a bully in the schoolyard.

H

 

Nor have I, but I have seen people claim they are getting traffic from directories...

But I am not the one making the initial claim.. I am disputing an unfounded claim, not claiming otherwise...

I would say about 75% of this game is indeed pure luck...

 

I'm in total agreement with this statement, we can agree to disagree, thats what great about a discussion\debate

Yes, luck is a major factor, but you need some knowledge to produce desired results, hopefully my next site that will take the keyword Jokes will be as successful as my funny pictures site, since the search volume is almost 4x more

I'm giving you +rep for sticking to your guns and keep this debate between use civil, unlike a few others in this thread. You did not attempt to discredit my knowledge, nor prove your "seo superiority" over me, which is an admired asset in my eyes.

 

Previously I lost all my search engine rankings and it took me two months to get them back. One of the websites receives 30,000 visitors a month. Since then I only use white hat strategies. Until something like this happens to you in your online business you will be convinced to only use white hat strategies.

 

Very good point. They wouldn't exist without the community, not the other way around. It's sad that they have become so powerful that they can dictate or influence so much.

 

I totally agree.

 

I am so disguised I have lost 400$ of income this months because of Google and it seems I may lose more cus of the page rank are still lowing on my blogs. I will not give up and Google knows if we lose they lose aswell.

 

Selling text links is a violation of Google Webmasters TOS and this has been stated over and over and over again. Your manipulating the pagerank system by doing this, I feel no remorse over what you've lost, monitize your site in a way that doesn't use a broken system to do so.

 

I assume you meant 'disgusted'.

I'd say try to find a different source of income, as the text link path is questionable. Not to say you couldn't still make some money with it, but I think you're barking up the wrong tree these days.

There's many other ways of making money on DP alone. I wish I had a graphics ability or could program well. Those can be a great way to make money. You could also get into the domain name business.

 

I sold links in my Sig and on blogs post reviews and that seems to still be going on. Look around you. I don't sell text links but as far as manipulating the PageRank is people have the money to fork it over than I am all for it. Google needs to compromise its system especially for those who are not selling links, like me.

 

I wish you can show me how to make money but I have been thinking about fliping domains. I was very lucking in selling one last month for 750$ .

 

So, if 100 people jump off a bridge would you do it to? Pagerank was NEVER designed to be monitized, it was designed to show the popularity of a page.

 

I think your conclusion is correct. Most of the penalization talk I've heard doesn't seem to be based on solid evidence at all. And to those of you saying that Google will catch every site selling links, I don't see it happening.

 

Yeah, I wish I had the link to this one blog on all the ways to make money on DP. It was very comprehensive. More ways than I had thought of myself.

Although it's very speculative, domain flipping can be a great way to make money. The folks over at namepros.com seem to be the most informed on it.

<back on topic>

Yeah, I agree with whatever was said above.

 

This is really a misleading statement. Inbound links are still easily the most important aspect of ranking in the SERPS.

The Google Bomb fix had to do with discounting the link reputation weight of inbound links with anchor text that is unrelated to the text on the page. For example "Google Bombing" George Bush's homepage with the word "MORON" won't work because the word MORON is nowhere on the page.

On the other hand "Google Bombing" (ie getting inbound links with a certain anchor text) still works for ranking in the SERPS (and is in fact the biggest element of ranking in the SERPS) if the anchor text is related to the words on the page (and far more importantly the words in the title of the page.)

 

May so but everthing does not stay the same- time changes everything and google will have to adjust to the changes aswell.

 

According to the poll at the top of the page, it's a pretty even split between those who pay for links and those who don't.