You completely missed my sarcasm... My point is this; If little g decided tomorrow that javascript was no longer acceptable and they "invented" something new, then we would all have to play by their rules by rolling over and chewing on our little bone... Thats exactly what we are all doing now by using nofollow. It is indeed all about adwords and paying little g and no one else.
What if I make a genuine link to another site within my content because I feel it is of use to the reader? Can Google mistake that as a paid link?
Absolutely... If you want to have your site indexed by the 90% plus popularity that little g has, you had better use nofollow on that link...
And you completely missed the larger point. Which is ironic because I know you understand it ... Google runs a web search engine, that's where their fame comes from. They want people to use nofollow, or javascript, or cloaking, or some other method of not letting unnatural links ( be they paid, traded, ransomed, whatever ) compromise the quality of their search engine. Google has no problem at all with you selling links. They have a problem with you selling access to their SERPs and an unnatural rank. It's pretty easy to understand why: if their overall quality falls people will turn to Yahoo and Ask. You don't have to follow their guidelines if you don't want to. They're requesting that people don't allow paid links to pass ranking power; they don't have way to compel anyone to do anything. But on the other hand, they don't have to list our sites in searches people do against the service they built. We get that for free. In my eyes that's a fair trade. But Google follows the standard they ask other people to when it comes to pain links. That's the bottom line.
I had one directory that droped like that from 2 to 0 and i didnt do or change anything then after the next update last time it went back up from 0 to 3 (it was a free directory no paid and i didnt buy any links) so mabye just wait and see what happens with yours it may come back up later on
damn right. who's going to link to a commercial site? who's going to link to a site for a factory making machine parts? who's going to link to a realtor's site? you'd get about 5 natural links, if you're lucky. i have a very useful site with thousands of users and fairly good traffic, and people are always sending me comments telling me what a useful and wonderful site i have, but my natural link count is exactly ZERO. i'd be dead in the water if it weren't for my machinations.
Thats funny, my humor site has countless backlinks Thats why I rank #2 for Funny Pictures, now to knock down FunnyJunk!
this is utter nonsense. if this were the case, 99% of all websites would be banned instantly. you are safe as long as you don't violate the guidelines. you don't have to withhold PR.
congrats... but see your site isn't commercial. if i were in humor, or music, or entertainment, or gossip, or whatever, i'd probably have a load of backlinks too. but most people have business websites. incidentally, that's why google adwords is so successful, the only way most people can get traffic is by advertising.
Its http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/ but yes its strange that its having a PR... yes its true that its a popular site.. but its selling links and at the same time no content... Google is more keen to punish Bloggers only?
basically, get a few rep links, buy a few links, get a few natural links and make a dam good site and you will be alrite...