Google Cracks Down on Link Buying
Although I’m not normally a simple parrot, I think all of you should take the time to read these two posts by Google’s Matt Cutts:
If you’ve ever thought about buying or selling links, there’s some serious food for thought here. I wonder how many people will drop out of programs like Text Link Ads because of this forceful stance by Google.
Please note that AdSense ads aren’t affected by this policy, as the links used in the ads don’t pass PageRank.
Eric Giguere is the author of several printed books and knows a thing or two about content monetization. Subscribe to his AdSense blog today and never miss any of his insightful comments. And the not-so-insightful ones, for that matter.
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December 3, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense
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3 Responses to “Google Cracks Down on Link Buying”
I know there are two sides to this story…and I think there’s plenty of room to criticize Google (and probably always will be), but I don’t really think this request is that unreasonable. If you want to protect the integrity of search results, a little cooperation doesn’t seem to be asking all that much.
Plus, by cooperating, Google has no excuse to not get the results straightened out…and I feel like they’ve got a long way to go (although, to be fair, they’ve been relatively kind to my sites)…so we gain some leverage to hold them accountable.
Hi Eric - pse can you clarify something for me? If one uses the rel=”nofollow” tag for links does it mean SEs don’t follow the link, so in their eyes it doesn’t count as an outbound link?
If that’s the case, then isn’t it possible that links are going to lose their effectiveness as a way for SEs to judge a website’s “authority”?
I ask this as it seems more and more webmasters will use the nofollow attribute to ensure they’re not seen by Google as selling links, while many also advocate the use of “nofollow” to prevent bleeding of “link juice” from a page’s theme.
Nofollow links are still links, but the “nofollow” tells search engines that the linked site is either not to be trusted or considered authoritative… in Google’s case it prevents the passing of PageRank (which is essentially a vote) to the linked site.
Search engines will still follow the link and index things it finds. But nofollow links affect the search index differently.