Comments on: Google Loses “Backwards Compatibility” On Paid Link Blocking & PageRank Sculpting

By: spgazette

spgazette — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 08:54:56 +0000

>>>”I recall it being described as a means to ensure your best pages got the most PageRank. I also recall being kind of annoyed about it (and think I said so during the meeting). For years, we’d been told that site owners shouldn’t have to do extraordinary things to help search engines.”

You don’t have to do extraordinary things to indicate your “important” pages. Naturally, they’ll be linked to the most (and from other important pages) and will accumulate more PR in due course. Yes, you have to do some kind of link manipulation to artificially assign more importance than a page deserves – is that what you mean?

By: bobthebuilder

bobthebuilder — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 08:34:26 +0000

It stunk when it was first proposed but it served two purposes:

1) It continued the perceptions that the Google algo was really advanced, and kept it at the top of the engines to watch (let’s make everyone jump through hoops) and in voice via people’s discussion boards. Favoured brand awareness.

2) It was also a cost-saving exercise – le’ts make the webmasters work to save our bandwidth, and unfortunately some people fell for it.

Thank goodness I’ve never listenedd to Matt or his blog, although I am sure he is a nice guy.

Yours has always been a pleasure Danny. I liked you’re presentation on Local the other day – you are right it’s too damned hard for people!

By: webcat

webcat — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 07:49:17 +0000

Thank you for your excellent article. Become even translated into Russian.

By: bonniegibbons

bonniegibbons — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 19:14:47 +0000

When we talk about using Javascript to “safely” serve paid links, we aren’t talking about gaming the system, since those links could never have been expected to pass PR, correct? We’re talking about the fact that certain kinds of links (such as those with recognizable adserving or affiliate network URLs in addition to script links) were inherently nofollow — either because they were uncrawlable or because they were clearly ads. And now that some scripted links have become crawlable, websites that were minding their own business are suddenly “in violation” of Google’s paid link policy? Seems that any way to handle this problem has, well, some problems. Google could simply treat these links as the dreaded paid links, which wouldn’t be fair to the unsuspecting masses who don’t open SEO blogs every day. Or they could add “grandfather” logic saying basically “this link is in a script, which used to be OK, so let’s give this paid link the benefit of the doubt.” Whereupon folks would start putting followed paid links into scripts in hopes of getting grandfathered in.

Even if one concedes the notion that paid links are so compromising (when, let’s face it, very little of what we do is “unpaid”), I’ve never understood why they need to actually penalize the violation rather than simply not rewarding it.

By: Winooski

Winooski — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 17:55:23 +0000

dazzlindonna: Great minds think alike? And, trust me, you have *plenty* of clout with me.

By: alexc

alexc — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 15:18:36 +0000

It’s not suprising at all – nofollow was meant to prevent web graph ranking manipulation via blog comment spam, consequently when faced witha side effect of lots of nofollow links on internal pages messing up with web graph ranking Google had to address it in some way before (and this might be inevitable) they might be forced to ignore nofollow on internal links completely.

By: Danny Sullivan

Danny Sullivan — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 14:39:01 +0000

Donna, I didn’t see your post or hear about it. It’s kind of crazy with the show — when I wrote this, I hadn’t even gotten through 200 pieces of email that had come in yesterday, either. I wouldn’t be surprised if similar to your post and mine, there were others out there on the same topic.

By: rexolio

rexolio — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 14:20:00 +0000

And just when I think I know about something that other SEO’s don’t take the time to do! DOH! Oh well – guess we all have to stick to the stuff that actually matters!

By: RankedHard

RankedHard — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 13:31:31 +0000

The question still remains will Google actual do something about PAID LINKS. They cry wolf, say it’s a no-no but when do they actually enforce their policies. Even when you use the Webmaster Tools to Report gross offenders, Nothing seems to be done about it. An SEO Comic http://www.rankedhard.com/crazy-eddies-link-emporium.php actually does a good job in a satirical approach to the issues.

By: dazzlindonna

dazzlindonna — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 11:27:52 +0000

Why do I feel like my little post at SEO Chicks (http://www.seo-chicks.com/917/why-listening-to-matt-cutts-is-a-bad-idea.html) just got upstaged by the big kahuna, Danny himself? Sorry, Danny, maybe it was coincidence, but it sure feels like you read my post (or heard about it), and then decided to write the same thing, only longer just an hour or two later. Ah well, I’ll pout for an hour, or until coffee kicks in this morning, and wish I had the same kind of clout Danny does. :) C’est la vie.