So you have finally made the decision to get off of the paid links crack and go straight. Do you go cold turkey? Do you take this in stages? There are great questions and the ones I will take on in today's post. There are two major reasons why you should make this switch, one of which is more obvious than the other: 1. The search engines are gunning for you. The paid link does not add value to their algorithm. Links are not useful as a ranking factor if they aren't freely given as true endorsements. They just aren't. So they want to discount them. The impact of this is that once yo [...]

Related Topics: Link Building | Link Building: Paid Links | Link Week

In January 2011, Google began sending out more webmaster tool spam notifications including notifications that your site has been penalized because of selling links. Now there are reports that Google is notifying webmasters that they have bad links pointing to their web site, as opposed to bad links on their web site pointing outwards. Here is a sample of the email notification from Google: Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.domain.com/, We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines. Specifically, look for [...]

Related Topics: Google: SEO | Google: Web Search | Google: Webmaster Central | Link Building: Paid Links | Top News

It's often said that paid links have created a false economy. As someone who has admittedly purchased links and contributed to that, I would definitely have to agree. I've caught loads of heck for buying links and there have been recent high-profile slaps for sites caught buying links, but what isn't often discussed is the role of the greedy webmaster in all of this. If webmasters didn't ask for money, we wouldn't buy links. If no one offered money though, webmasters wouldn't ask for it. It's the chicken or the egg, all over again. The recent Harvard porn links outing is just one of many [...]

Related Topics: Link Building | Link Building: General | Link Building: Paid Links | Link Week

J.C. Penney appears to be back in Google's good graces after a 90-day penalty that removed the retailer from appearing prominently in Google's search results for both short- and long-tail phrases. The company has regained first- and second-page rankings on a number of terms that were mentioned in a New York Times exposé of Penney's search rankings and the tactics used to get them -- tactics that violated Google's guidelines. Two recent reports offer visual evidence of J.C. Penney's return to Google's good graces: First, SEO Clarity says it's been tracking more than 2,000 JC [...]

Related Topics: Google: SEO | Link Building: General | Link Building: Paid Links | SEO: Spamming | Top News

Over the weekend, the New York Times published a story called Trying to Game Google on "Mother’s Day Flowers". Yet more big companies got outed for buying links, but this time, Google didn't say the links had helped. The story covers how top web sites that rank for search terms related to online flowers sales also appear to have purchased links. The names large brands such as Teleflora, FTD, 1800Flowers.com and ProFlowers as doing this. The reporter sent a list of 6,000 links (apparently paid links, though this isn't clear) that these companies acquired over a month's time to Google. G [...]

Related Topics: Google: SEO | Google: Web Search | Link Building: Paid Links | SEO: Spamming