I have some questions and since I am clearly crazy (see below), and this make take some thinking. Usually I'm the one answering questions, but in this case maybe knowing the questions will be enough to start that thinking. Buying links in directories and portal sites has been a common practice for years. It seems though that Google is increasing their efforts to stomp this practice out as it sees it as an attempt to manipulate rankings.

The general public can now report paid link sites directly to Google for them to investigate here.

Google has yet to be completely clear about the issue though. In this
recent post, they say this form should be used to report "sites buying and selling links for purposes of search engine manipulation".

For those thousands of legitimate websites who sell links as part of a business model, Google suggests this: "If you are selling links for advertising purposes, here are many ways you can designate this, including:
* Adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to the href tag
* Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file"

Ok, so how do you verify whether a site has charged for a link or not. What if they do both? A paid link site might have a blog with unpaid links. This situation could get even more interesting as Yahoo allows paid links in both their directory AND their search results.

What if you pay a blogging company to write and link to you? This is also now quite common practice. What if I buy my buddy a beer (a good Canadian beer, not that watered down stuff) and he puts a link on his site to me? Good luck finding that out.

There are a whole lot of questions here. If you search around the web, there are also a lot of people with a lot of answers, or at least opinions. So what's my 2 cents worth? Glad you asked! Here it is:

Google needs to put less or zero emphasis in it's algorithm on links.

Yes, I'm quite clearly crazy.

The search engine systems have been designed from the beginning to provide relevant results. Systems can of course be manipulated. If I get enough links pointing at my page that all say "sexiest man on earth" in the text, this site will rank for that search. Hey...... anyone want to link to me?

Interesting, but not relevant, result. So what's Google to do? Apparently they want people to tattle on paid link sites. Interesting. I know Google is one of the most sophisticated and technologically advanced companies in the world but I don't think
even they could come up with a beer detection algorithm.

But if they didn't put weight on links, then what would Google judge sites on?

Content. (Did I mention I'm nuts?) In fact in my opinion link strength should be measured on the relevancy of the two sites to each other, but I don't work at Google.

So what should you do? As always, listen to what Google says then do it. Don't buy links, and if you have paid links on your site, use the nofollow tag. It's not worth it. If you run a site that makes money solely on selling PageRank, look into a new career, I hear search engine optimization experts do ok. In the meantime, I'm going
to work on my beer detection.

Labels: Google, Links, search engine optimization