The Google Webmaster Central blog has a post on “dealing” with low quality backlinks. In that post, Google basically explains that incoming links is “just one of many” ranking factors. That being the case, Google says if you have bad quality incoming links, “don’t fret” it and focus on things you can control, like your content.

Google does offer advice, such as asking the source of the link to remove your site from their page. If that doesn’t work, there is not much you can do. There is currently no tool in Webmaster Tools to communicate to Google to ignore certain links from sources on the Internet.

Google explains that over time they remove low quality sources from their index, so these links should not hurt you over time. Google recommends you report low quality sites in their spam report tool or paid link report.

Facebook allows you to embed fan pages on your own site, which might result in Facebook outranking you for your own brand name. For example, the Search Engine Land fan page has a link for me to “add a fan box to your site.” If you look at the code of that widget, you might notice Facebook is using your brand name as the anchor text to the Facebook URL. Since the URL is search engine friendly and since Facebook has a lot of link popularity and trust, I wouldn’t be surprised to see some Facebook pages outranking the official brand web site, due to this new gadget code.

Here is a screen capture of the code:

I want you to notice this part of the code:

<a href=”http://www.facebook.com/searchengineland”>Search Engine Land</a> on Facebook

As you can see, that is rich anchor text pointing to Facebook. Potentially, Facebook can outrank this site for our own name. So, if you are concerned about that, beware on how you use this gadget and where you use it. Of course, you can always slap on the nofollow attribute to the link, so Google won’t pass along any juice to that page.

Hat tip to Sam from OhNuts for sending this my way.

Imagine that you fired up your computer and found that a bunch of your programs no longer worked, because behind the scenes, the operating system had been upgraded without any backwards compatibility. That’s what happened this week with Google. Some things that were working just fine now are broken, because Google isn’t being backwards compatible. And that’s fairly unprecedented.

Don’t panic. One of the changes really shouldn’t hurt many sites, impacting only a “power SEO” technique commonly called PageRank sculpting that I’d say fairly few use. The other has a bigger impact and potentially means thousands of sites may now be violating Google’s rules on paid link without knowing it. But that’s not likely to have an immediate impact. I’ll explain both changes in more depth below.

The most important thing is that in both cases, the changes may require site owners to alter their web sites not because they were “chasing the algorithm” but instead because they were following Google’s own rules and instructions. They were doing what was advised, and now they may have to undo that work.

That’s the unprecedented part. Google has constantly upgraded how it deals with site content, from early advances like indexing PDF documents to later changes like showing “sitelinks” for web sites. These upgrades have been generally good and involved little to no work on the part of the site owner, until now.

PageRank Sculpting: Spending A Page’s Authority Money

Let’s take PageRank sculpting. In general, every individual web page that Google finds has some degree of importance that the page can pass on to other pages — PageRank. Links from that page to other pages are how it passes that importance along. And in its most basic, earliest form, each link on the page equally shared some of the importance.

Consider it like this. Imagine authority is money, and a particular page has $10 in “authority” to spend. It links out to 10 pages, so each of those pages gets $1 ($10 divided by 10). If it links to 20 pages, each gets 50 cents ($10 divided by 20). If it links to 5 pages, each page gets $2 (you get the math by now).

With PageRank sculpting, the idea is to effectively block some of the links on your web page (using the nofollow attribute or some other means) from getting any authority. Perhaps you have a lot of navigational links to other pages inside your web site. Rather than spend authority money on these pages, you might prefer to spend it on a smaller number of important pages that could use a boost.

PageRank Sculpting Gets Popular

This technique has been around for ages and had various names until the middle of 2007. That’s when it went more mainstream in the advanced SEO space. And in particular, it went that way I feel because Google spam fighting czar Matt Cutts talked about how Google’s YouTube was using PageRank sculpting during an open discussion at Google with a variety of advanced SEO people about techniques and issues.

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. Good page titles, good ability to be crawled, sure. But having to think about things on a link-by-link basis? That’s something I assumed Google was already up to snuff about. My assumption had been that Google long decided to discount how much credit it assigned to things like navigational links, when it could see the same links appearing on multiple pages within the same web site.

Now to be clear, it’s not like Matt told everyone in the room to immediately do PageRank sculpting. Many topics were discussed, and this was just one of many things covered. But it was advice that came from Google — and it turned into a genie that wouldn’t go into the bottle.

Soon after, Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz did an article about the topic, and more soon followed on the web. It was a topic at conferences. It was a hot new fashion in SEO. And while plenty in the SEO space will chase after the latest (and often useless) algorithm fad — this was a chase sparked by Google itself. Why wouldn’t advanced people do it?

PageRank Sculpting Gets Debated

Not everyone agreed it was helpful. There’s been quite a bit of debate on whether it gives boost or not. Some have argued against using it at all. And the search engines, when asked about it since it gained popularity, have generally said that there are other things that are better worth the effort. But neither had they ruled it out. As I summarized last year:

I agree with the view that sculpting is a marginal activity compared to other things that can be done. But if you’re an advanced SEO — even someone advanced in terms of working with design issues — maybe it’s not so marginal. The search engines themselves are saying it has some value. They’ve not said it’s a flat out waste of time. And if you’ve mastered all the other things that are much more important, then yes, something like this may very well be worth giving more attention to.

Or as Michael Gray explained, if you’re driving a beat-up old car of a web site, putting a PageRank sculpting “engine” in it probably isn’t worthwhile. But if you’ve got a hot new sports car, well….

PageRank Sculpting Gets Depreciated

So today at SMX Advanced, sculpting was being discussed, and then Matt Cutts dropped a bomb shell that it no longer works to help flow more PageRank to the unblocked pages. Again — and being really simplistic here — if you have $10 in authority to spend on those ten links, and you block 5 of them, the other 5 aren’t going to get $2 each. They’re still getting $1. It’s just that the other $5 you thought you were saving is now going to waste.

Further, it was explained that YouTube wasn’t doing sculpting way back in 2007 as a way to boost certain video content. Instead, it was that YouTube randomly shows some video content and didn’t want these random selections to perhaps gain more authority than they should. And even with the change announced today, that still works. In the past, the unblocked videos got more authority money and the blocked ones got none. Now, the unblocked videos still get authority money — just not as much — and the blocked ones still get none.

But while that may be how it works on YouTube, I still recall PageRank sculpting being positioned by Google as a way to also give some pages more link juice. To quote Matt when asked about this in an official Google thread:

What are some appropriate ways to use the nofollow tag? One good example is the home page of expedia.com. If you visit that page, you’ll see that the “Sign in” link is nofollow’ed. That’s a great use of the tag: Googlebot isn’t going to know how to sign into expedia.com, so why waste that PageRank on a page that wouldn’t benefit users or convert any new visitors? Likewise, the “My itineraries” link on expedia.com is nofollow’ed as well. That’s another page that wouldn’t really convert well or have any use except for signed in users, so the nofollow on Expedia’s home page means that Google won’t crawl those specific links.

Most webmasters don’t need to worry about sculpting the flow of PageRank on their site, but if you want to try advanced things with nofollow to send less PageRank to copyright pages, terms of service, privacy pages, etc., that’s your call.

I’ve bolded the key part. Matt stresses — as he’s consistently done since talking about this at the SEO meeting — that this is something most people didn’t need to worry about or do. But saying “why waste that PageRank” means that at the time of giving this advice, PageRank was something that could be “saved” and “spent” on other pages.

You can expect Matt will do a blog post to cover this topic more. You can expect lots of people to be analyzing the change, and what it might or might not mean. And you should really understand that it was never the case that links shared equally in the amount of authority money a page had. In talking with Matt during the “You & A Session” at SMX Advanced, he confirmed that Google itself makes many determinations of how exactly a page can spend that authority money. IE — while a page might have $10 to spend, Google itself largely acts as the page’s investment banker, not the page’s author.

I wouldn’t panic and immediately start removing nofollow attributes that have been done for PageRank sculpting purposes. In general, I’d never recommend changing anything to a site that seems to be performing well. Take the time to let more discussion and information come from Google and other sources.

JavaScript onClick & Paid Link Worries

Those who PageRank sculpted following Google’s advice may have spent time doing something that no longer will work, or work as effectively, but they’ve not necessarily wasted time. Maybe it was helping them some in the past (plenty believe this). And they might not have to spend time removing it, any more than there are plenty of sites that still have meta keywords tags in place even though widespread search engine support of this was dropped long ago. That’s good depreciation, or effectively backwards compatibility. No one needs to change anything because the sites still keep “working” despite the past support being gone.

It’s a different case with Google’s new handling of JavaScript’s “onClick” function. To fully understand it, read Vanessa Fox’s in-depth report from last week, Google I/O: New Advances In The Searchability of JavaScript and Flash, But Is It Enough?, which broke the news here.

Links in JavaScript that were invisible to Google before are now being read. And some people have used JavaScript as a way to deliver paid links in a way that don’t violate Google’s guidelines may not technically on the wrong side of the Google law. It’s been a long accepted practice that this was a “safe” way to deal with paid links, once that Google’s suggested itself.

It’s as if Google has suddenly passed a new safety helmet law for web sites, mandating that the old helmets they’d been using are no longer good enough. Now they need to do something different.

What about nofollow? After all, Google’s been pushing nofollow as something sites should do as a safety device for paid links long after paid links themselves had been in existence.

True, and there are plenty of sites out there that have never caught up with this new Google guideline (and still sucky for those who really still innocently don’t know better). But that’s different than sites that thought they were doing the right thing and now which have to change again.

For the record, Matt said today that there’s no immediate penalties likely to be given out. Honestly, I think the spam team is still having to digest how to handle this change that’s been brought about by Google’s crawling team. And he also said that the nofollow attribute can be applied to JavaScript links that are not otherwise being redirected through a robots.txt block.

As I said in the case of PageRank sculpting, I wouldn’t immediately panic. But unlike with PageRank sculpting, if you’re selling paid links and thought JavaScript was protecting you, I would fairly quickly ensure that redirects are blocked by using nofollow within the JavaScript itself or by going through a robots.txt block.

(For an example of this, our paid links get delivered through JavaScript generated by Google Ad Manager. The links all get redirected through this domain — http://googleads.g.doubleclick.net — and you can see from the robots.txt file there that search engines aren’t allowed to crawl it. So, the links pass no authority on to other pages)

Backwards Compatibility Is Important

Overall, I want Google to keep advancing. But it needs to ensure that the changes don’t dramatically cause more work for site owners, as a result. We need a period of backwards compatibility in terms of Google indexing, just as much as it’s helpful with computer operating systems.

For more about the discussions today out of SMX Advanced, also see these selected stories from the live blogging round-up:

• Duplicate Content Solutions & The Canonical Tag – SMX Advanced Coverage 2009, SEO Gadget
• Duplicate Content Solutions & The Canonical Tag, outspokenmedia.com
• Beyond the Usual Link Building, outspokenmedia.com
• Beyond the usual linkbuilding – SMX Advanced 2009, SEO Gadget
• Live from SMX Advanced: Beyond the Usual Link Building, Search Marketing Sage
• Nofollow Makes News at SMX Advanced, BruceClay.com
• You&A With Matt Cutts, outspokenmedia.com

Matt Cutts twittered that Google.co.jp was penalized for paying for blogger reviews. If you look at the FriendFeed details, you will see Matt first said, “Google.co.jp PageRank is now ~5 instead of ~9. I expect that to remain for a while.” And then when he was questioned if this was a paid link penalty, he said “yes.”

Google Blogoscoped has more details about the why with their story named Google Japan Reportedly Bought Blog Posts in Promotion Campaign, Now Issued Apology.

Akky Akimoto at the Asiajin blog recently reported that Google Japan was paying bloggers to review a new Google widget. Using pay-per-post service CyberBuzz, blog posts like the following popped up, strangely resembling each other, as Asiajin reports.

The Google Japan blog’s apology translated into:

Google Japan is running several promotional activities to let people know more about our products.

It turns out that using blogs on the part of the promotional activities violates Google’s search guidelines, so we have ended the promotion. We would like to apologize to the people concerned and to our users, and are making an effort to make our communications more transparent in order to prevent the recurrence of such an incident.

How long will this PageRank penalty last? Matt Cutts of Google said, “I expect that to remain for a while.” Any takers on what “a while” means?

Postscript From Danny Sullivan:

Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google and The 2007 Paid Links War, In Review from Search Engine Land are past articles that provide further background about how Google has actively campaigned against sites either buying or selling links and implementing a range of penalties against those that do, including Google Toolbar PageRank decreases.

While it might seem amazing that Google is penalizing itself, this isn’t the first time something like this has happened. Back in 2005, help pages for Google’s search appliance product were found to be cloaking content, showing Google’s spider something different than what human visitors see. When this was noticed, Google removed the pages from its index and required the team in charge of them to file a reinclusion request.

The penalty now applied to Google Japan will certainly help Google be seen as enforcing its rules fairly, even against itself. But I’d also expect it will reignite the paid link debate once again. If Google itself, however it happened, found itself in this situation — how are ordinary web sites to be expected to know the “rules” about what they can or cannot do?

I’d warn against anyone from seizing upon this as an excuse to buy or sell links, however. The bottom line in such cases — when someone has been caught — is really how important a site is to warrant inclusion. Large and important sites generally get a mild slap on the hand, just as Google is, in this case. They do not get banned permanently, as that would hurt the relevancy of Google’s results. Smaller sites that won’t be noticed if they go missing indeed might find themselves missing.

Matt’s on the Ask The Search Engines panel tomorrow at our SMX West conference, and has been busy there attending all this week. I expect he’ll likely address the issue a bit more on the panel and knowing Matt, I’d also expect he’ll probably do a fairly comprehensive review of the situation on his blog after getting clear of the show. I could be wrong, of course, and I’m not trying to set expectations. That’s just what he’s tended to do with these types of issues — so if you were hoping for something longer from him other than a Twitter mention, I’d hang in there.

The ever-helpful teams writing for Google’s Webmaster Central blog and Microsoft Live Search’s Webmaster Center blog have published a variety of videos and presentations this week in the name of helping webmasters and search engine optimizers.

On the Live Search blog, Nathan Buggia recaps his SMX East presentation on Webmaster Guidelines, shares the slides from his talk, and expands on topics such as paid links, cloaking, and website penalties. He shares some detail on how Live Search handles paid links:

Essentially we look at each link individually to understand the degree to which the site is really endorsing the link. So, while we most likely will not ban your site for buying or selling a few links, it is also likely that they may not actually end up providing any value either.

In a separate post, Nathan also shares his presentation on URLs and Domains. A third post recapping Live Search’s SMX East talks is promised, but hasn’t been published yet.

Meanwhile, over at the Google Webmaster Central blog, the team has created a presentation called “Google for Webmasters.” It’s geared more toward beginner webmasters and covers Discoverability, Accessibility, Ranking, Webmaster Central, and Other Resources. The presentation dedicates an entire slide to emphasizing — or, more accurately, de-emphasizing — the importance of PageRank, and another slide answers the common question, Why do rankings change?

You can see the full slide presentation, or watch a handful of separate videos on the Webmaster Central blog.

(Pssst. Yahoo, where are your slides from SMX East?)

Google has been posting advice on links all this week. The two previous posts were on link architecture and external linking. Yesterday’s post was on the topic of inbound links.

Google explains that inbound links not only bring you visitors but can positively influence your Google rankings. But when can these links give you a positive boost in Google? Google carefully writes, “when the links are merit-based and freely-volunteered as an editorial choice, they’re also one of the positive signals to Google about your site’s importance.” Yes, only “merit-based and freely-volunteered as an editorial choice” types of links, not the other ones. I find it funny how Google does not mention “paid” links at all in the post, instead, they make sure to mention “free” links.

Google then gives some tips on how to get the links that can positively influence your rankings. And then adds some tips on what not to do, such as “don’t engage in mass link-begging.” Clearly, this post is not too detailed – I am personally a bit disappointed in that. I should have known better, but I kind of was expecting more from this specific post.

Brian Ussery reported that Google has dropped two important bullet points from the Google Webmaster Guidelines. Those bullet points include:

• Have other relevant sites link to yours.
• Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

At the same time, Google Blogoscoped reported that Google removed the dictionary link in the search results, at the top right of the results page. Related, I am not sure.

I speculated that maybe Google is going to go after more directories in the future. By removing those two bullet points, maybe Google can do this – without seeming all that hypocritical. In addition, I noted a comment from Google John Mueller at a Google Groups thread where he explained the logic behind removing those two points:

I wouldn’t necessarily assume that we’re devaluing Yahoo’s links, I just think it’s not one of the things we really need to recommend. If people think that a directory is going to bring them lots of visitors (I had a visitor from the DMOZ once), then it’s obviously fine to get listed there. It’s not something that people have to do though :-).

As you can imagine, this is causing a bit of a commotion in some of the forums. Some are worried, some are mad, and some are confused by the change.

Debate continues about Google’s war on paid links. But regardless of where you stand, I think most people would agree buying and selling is risky behavior. You don’t really want the world to know you’re doing it. And if you’re going to engage in paid links, I think many would agree you shouldn’t be trying to trick people into something that might cause them harm. This week, from my inbox, an example of a company going wrong on both counts.

I get requests for us to sell links from Search Engine Land and Sphinn all the time. We don’t do that. Personally, I disagree with selling credit to other sites in this way. From a business perspective, it would be pretty hard for a leading industry site about search marketing to think it could sell links without that being noticed and dinged by Google.

When I do get requests, they’re typically sent to a generic webmaster address, with a pitch that mentions our sites. These consistently reflect stupidity to me. They come from people who have taken no time at all to understand what our sites are about (often they have a generic pitch about how links and search engines work, you know, because that’s something we clearly have never covered here).

Send me a stupid request like this, and I’ll typically send it over to Google. Don’t like that? Then don’t be an idiot and send these type of things to me. Link requests like this simply demonstrate pure incompetence on the part of a paid link broker.

On now to this week’s fun. Normally if I have a few minutes, I’ll ask a follow-up question about link pitch. Then typically, someone takes a closer look at my site and runs away quickly. Not this time. This conversation went on and on. Let’s dive in.

We are currently wondering if you accept “paid” advertising on your website. We are looking to place a text link URL reading “search engine optimisation” which will then link to [SITE URL REMOVED] once clicked. Ideally, we want this to appear on the home page and carry through all pages of your website. Please can you let me if this is possible and if so, how much?

Notice there’s no mention of any risk. This is fairly typical of messages like this. They also tend to suggest this is advertising of some type. And it is, but again, advertising with a risk to those who might innocently accept it.

This was sent to our Sphinn forum site, and you’d think the person doing it would have some idea that we know about paid links. Certainly they should have enough brains to know that no, we’re not going to do something like this — nor would they want us to.

I mean, when you have the likes of Google’s Matt Cutts — who heads Google’s spam team — visiting Sphinn on a regular basis, that’s the kind of link he’ll notice. It’s sort of like waving a red flag at a bull. And if this SEO company is too stupid to realize that when building links for themselves, what type of mess will they get their clients into?

I wrote back:

We don’t currently do this. Aren’t there some kind of search engine issues involved if we did it? I thought I read about something like this on some site about SEO news, that Google doesn’t like it?

And was told:

Many websites do this – for a fee. However, I understand your concern; would it be possible to get a link on your home page or through a select amount instead?

And responded:

I suppose we could sell a link on just our home page or certain select pages, but you didn’t cover my concern. Will that get me in some type of trouble? Or is it only an issue if you sell links on every page of your web site. I just remember reading something on some site about internet marketing news (can’t remember which one) that somehow it might be bad or get you in trouble.

Twice now I’ve mentioned reading some sites about internet marketing and SEO news. If this person had carefully researched Sphinn, it should have registered that there was no way they’d be wanting a link from us. But nope. They came back with:

It’s called outbound links and they are relevant to what you do. It’s basically a form of Search Engine Optimisation. The more relevant the link is, the better it is and can even create a higher page ranking. As an SEO and PPC Google Qualified company, this would not be in our best interest to link up to companies that can get either party in trouble. Feel free to check our website so you can see just how credible we are. We have offices in the UK, Spain and the United States. This shouldn’t be an issue at all.

Wow. Before this, I had indeed checked out the company. They offer a range of online marketing services and proudly sport a “Google AdWords Qualified Company” logo. And in this message, that’s being used to confuse me to think they’re somehow “SEO qualified,” something Google doesn’t do.

A slight ding to Google here. I understand the ad side of the house is different from the search team. That’s why you still carry ads that appear for terms like cloaking or from paid link ad companies, despite the search term telling site owners not to do such tings. But maybe that church-and-state divide needs to be broken down a bit more. One of the qualifications to be Google Advertising Professional probably should be that you don’t lie or mislead clients, paid search or not.

The response was also amazing that I was being reassured that they’re credible in the same breath where they’re lying (or incredibly ignorant) that this is a trouble-free activity. I responded:

I can see the “AdWords” qualification from Google on your site now that I’ve looked, but where’s the thing about being SEO qualified by Google. I didn’t realize they did that.

The site looks really credible. But I still am worried about that paid link stuff. I read it on some news site, Search Engine Land or something like that maybe? But I can’t remember. Anyway, I went over to Google’s web site to see if they had stuff. I found this page.

They make it sound like selling links is bad, unless I use this nofollow thing? Is that what you want me to do?

Honestly, I figured this would be it. I mean, I’m mentioning Search Engine Land now. And I’m pointing at Google’s page that warns against buying or selling links, unless link credit is blocked:

Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.

As I said earlier, people disagree on whether Google should take this stance. They even disagree over whether people really do get punished (big sites tend not to be banished from the index). But I think virtually everyone would agree that there is risk involved, if you care about your Google rankings. And so far, this company hasn’t acknowledged that in its pitch to me. So after pointing out what Google says, they responded:

Within the article that you sent me, Google does specify: “A site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it” and “Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of links count towards this rating.”

As we are a credible and relative company, this does not do harm and if anything, is a good link.

More importantly,

“Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:

• Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the <a> tag
• ****Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file****

The last paragraph is exactly what we are asking you to do, which is within Google’s guidelines. There is no such thing as SEO qualified, but we are qualified and regulated by Google for our ad words and services.

We just want a link text that reads ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ and once clicked, goes to [REMOVED]

I don’t want you feeling uncomfortable, but this is a completely normal practice for a credible company with a quality page rank and quality relevance.

Have a think and let me know if you wish to proceed.

Are you kidding me? How do I hate this response? Let me bulletpoint the ways:

• They continue to simultaneously lie to me and tell me they are a credible company.
• Suddenly, they say I should block the flow of PageRank from this link to their site, which was NOT mentioned before and which I’m sure they’re only saying because they think they can trick me another way out of doing this.
• After telling me they were SEO qualified by Google, now they admit “there’s no such thing” but still try to make it seem like they have some type of Google approval for their actions.
• And they close again by lying to me about how “normal” this is for a “credible” company

Again, I respond:

Sorry to go on about this, but it’s easy to get nervous with all the information and misinformation out there.

So you want me to put up a link that goes to [REMOVED], but you want me to set up some type of redirect in between that’s blocked, right? So like maybe…

From sphinn.com’s home page to sphinn.com/block.php (which we’d block Google from spidering) to [REMOVED]? And that meets the guidelines. OR is there another way you want it setup?

Turns out, I was right about them not really wanting me to do redirection. They responded:

Hello, all I want is a link that says the phrase ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ and once that word is clicked on, it takes users to [REMOVED]

If you look on the website [NEW WEBSITE REMOVED] and go to the bottom of the page, you will see the link that says search engine optimisation and it appears on every page of that website and it takes people to our website.

This is what I am asking for, is this possible?

As you can see, no redirection is involved. I think they assumed I was ignorant enough to believe that clicking on a link and getting to a new site was the same thing as “redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file.” You also have to appreciate how they tell a complete stranger about a site that’s apparently linking to them through a paid deal.

I went back yet again, to the point and making it clear that I understood what was going on:

I don’t see how I could do this. That’s a direct link to your web site. No redirection, no blocking through nofollow. It’s exactly the opposite of what that Google page said is allowable. If you can explain to me how it does fit in the Google guidelines, then I’ll consider it. Are you sure doing that would be all ethical and OK according to Google?

And they came back with:

To be honest Danny, I’d rather not bother as it seems you haven’t even checked the website I showed you as an example. If you read the Google guidelines again, it says PAID ADVERTISING IS NOT ALWAYS ILLEGAL IF DONE PROPERLY.

I don’t know what to suggest, it’s an outbound link that will benefit you in turn as we are a page rank 6 on Google.

Hey, I’m a PageRank 6 as well. I mean I used to be PR7 before this week’s update, so I’m glad to learn all the hard work here at Search Engine Land means we’re reported with a visible rating from Google’s Toolbar to be equivalent in quality to this crappy SEO firm. OK, when I looked, turns out they are PR5. So I guess I can feel slightly better.

Anyway, I digress from the main point. Is this person continuing to lie to me or just grossly ignorant of the technical issues involved? It doesn’t matter — no one should be dealing with them, much less the company that employs them. To help in their education, I wrote back:

I did check the example. There’s no nofollow; there’s no robots.txt blocking. It does not meet the Google guidelines for what’s acceptable as a paid link, as far as I can tell.

I’m fairly familiar with the Google guidelines having written about Google and SEO for the past 13 years now. But I’ll check with someone over there within their search quality team and see if the example you’ve sent me is indeed acceptable.

I’d love to think there was an “oh shit” moment when this arrived in their email box, that maybe they finally comprehended that I wasn’t some ignorant web site owner who could be coaxed into doing something that might harm my site but instead someone with a pretty good line of communication directly into the heart of Google’s spam team. But I kind of doubt it. They seem pretty stupid.

By the way, Google did tell me the link wasn’t acceptable. Plus, they were already well aware of this particular company, having received reports from others including SEOs who seemed as disgusted with them as I am.

As I started out with, there are plenty of people who disagree over the paid link issue, plus whether Google actually penalizes sites that hard for it. That disagreement is no excuse for unethical behavior. And there is unethical behavior in search marketing, and this is a perfect example of it. No risk was disclosed. When asked repeatedly about risk issues, they were denied.

Companies that do this sort of thing should be ashamed. If they or individuals want to do what Jeremy Schoemaker is writing about today in The Screw Google Mentality, where they do what they want and don’t worry about what Google cares, that’s fine. It’s not a new concept, and there have been plenty of people over the years who have understood that they don’t have to follow Google’s rules as long as they don’t want Google’s traffic (sadly, far more people rather break the rules knowingly and then whine when they’ve been hurt).

If you make the decision for yourself, are prepared to accept the consequences, then do as you please. But no one should be dragging others into a potential mess without making them aware of the risks. You want to buy links or be a link broker? Then be upfront that this is an activity that Google does not like and that the faint hearted shouldn’t apply. Only after you’ve scared the heck out of them should you start talking about the ways that you’ll try to reduce the risk, if they choose to carry on.

Toolbar PageRank penalties are nothing new to the SEO world, we see them all the time. But when Todd Friesen broke the news that FindLaw.com is marketing a new advertising service to sell links that will “help you increase your company’s visibility, rank and penetration within natural search results on major search engines such as Google,” as the FindLaw email said, the legal industry was somewhat shocked.

Back in October 2007, we reported that Google officially said that selling or buying links can hurt your PageRank and/or rankings in Google. We then saw the sledge hammer hit and sites noticed that their Toolbar PageRank scores dropped drastically. But even with all this publicity and all the official Google documentation, FindLaw.com managed to send out an email marketing blast to sell text links that are marketed to increase a site’s rankings.

What happened? FindLaw.com noticed that their Toolbar PageRank score dropped from a 7 to a 5.

Google’s Matt Cutts even commented at Todd’s post, saying:

Yup, somebody forwarded that email to me too.

Then soon after, FindLaw’s PageRank fell.

Kevin O’Keefe was upset with FindLaw.com’s actions and laid out a “course of conduct” for how FindLaw.com should handle this situation. Steve Matthews was shocked by how “blatantly overt” FindLaw.com was about selling the text links, going as far as sending out:

spammy marketing materials, unsolicited emails, selling links based on PageRank, training lawyers how to show ‘link love’ and apply link text, and just generally having the feel of a total Machiavellian manipulation of the system. Frankly, it was arrogant.

FindLaw.com has yet to comment about this penalty. They were impacted by the visual Toolbar PageRank score, and yes, there is a difference between real PageRank and Toolbar PageRank. But FindLaw.com’s Google rankings seem to not be impacted, which is the norm for these cases. Google was to discourage link buyers from buying links on the basis of PageRank. At the same time, FindLaw.com has quality content they want the Google searcher to find. So all they need to do is take away the visual PageRank in order to discourage the sale of links on these sites.

The paid links debate is back, this time about whether Google wants all links in a paid post to have a nofollow attribute. Below, a look at the latest round, plus a recap of this year’s "War On Paid Links" by Google and where the other search engines stand on the subject.

The current round was sparked by an IZEA (previously Pay Per Post) post inviting the major search engines to clarify their stances on links in paid posts. Ted Murphy blogged that he talked to Matt Cutts at Pubcon, who told him that all links in a paid post should have the nofollow attribute, not just links to the site that paid for the review:

I explained to Matt that in SocialSpark all links required by an advertiser would carry the no-follow tag. I thought this would be a great thing. Matt commended the decision, but then added ALL links inside of any sponsored post should carry the no-follow tag period, regardless of whether they are required, not required or even link to the advertiser paying for the post. That means if Nikon pays me to review a camera and I link off to a site about photography that link needs to be no-follow, along with the link to the blog of my buddy the photographer. His reasoning was that the sponsored post wouldn’t exist without the sponsor paying for it, therefore all the content is commercial and should be no-follow.

The ramifications of that statement and policy didn’t hit me until I was on a jet back to Orlando. Is Google really saying that all content that is commercially driven by a sponsor should carry no-follow tags?

That type of policy seemed a bit much to some people, such as Andy Beard, who blogged a variety of examples of how this type of policy might be interpreted, concluding:

There is absolutely no way I can comply with these current new demands, I would have to stick nofollow on every link within some of my most popular and highly rated content.

You’ll also find discussion of Andy’s post here at Sphinn.

Matt Cutts then responded, explaining that putting nofollow on all links in a paid post would be safe but suggesting he was not saying it was required:

I think quoting me as saying "ALL links inside of any sponsored post should carry the no-follow tag period, regardless of whether they are required, not required or even link to the advertiser paying for the post" is different than our conversation. I believe that I said that adding nofollow to all links in paid posts would certainly be safe. Then I asked if you were going to require nofollow on required links, why not put them on all links in paid posts? I think you replied that your business model didn’t support that, but I may be misremembering.

Ted then did a fresh post, accusing Google of having a double-standard over paid links, since TechCrunch — which had been previously held up as an example by IZEA of not having sponsored links without the nofollow attribute – was not ever apparently penalized. TechCrunch got fresh attention since it recently just added nofollow (see posts on this from Andy Beard, Michael Gray, and discussion at Sphinn). Wrote Ted:

Now, almost a month later TC decides to add a no-follow to their most recent thank our sponsors post and you commend them in your comment. You were clearly aware of the situation. You said it was a violation. Why didn’t TC suffer the same punishment as the smaller bloggers that were hit with a PR0? Why is there a double standard? What about the previous thank our sponsors posts that still don’t have no-follow?

It is this double standard that makes it very difficult for us to enforce policies on linking. Competing businesses are not held to the same standard.

The debate is just the latest in a long line of disagreements over how search engines treat paid links. A quick search of Matt Cutts’s blog shows that he’s been talking about it a lot, and for a long time.

Notably, Matt was talking about the issue back in 2005, and in January 2006, said he thought the topic was pretty "picked over". But in April 2007, Matt blogged about how to report paid links, which Danny felt — in his Search Engine Land: Time For Google To Give Up The Fight Against Paid Links? post — kicked off Google’s second "war on paid links," with the first having been over the SearchKing case.

If it was a second war, things continued along. Google launched a paid links reporting form within Google’s Webmaster Tools in June. At SES San Jose, Matt participated in the "Are Paid Links Evil" session, where Michael Gray proclaimed that "Google is not the government." For more, see:

• Matt Cutts’s comments and slides from SES
• Michael Gray’s slides from SES
• SEOmoz: The Paid Links Debate Rages On
• Search Engine Roundtable: Are Paid Links Evil?

During the fall, some sites saw their Google Toolbar PageRank drop. First sites that were believed to be selling links saw a PageRank reduction, kicking off a huge debate across various search blogs. Soon after, sites that had a substantial number of links from link-selling sites saw drops. Even though those links weren’t paid, the many link-selling sites either had less PageRank flowing from them or lost their ability to pass PageRank altogether, which created a ripple PageRank reduction effect, which Matt and I discussed in this WebProNews video.

Finally, Google formally added a warning against link selling to its online help files in late November, and then in early December the Official Google Webmaster Central blog featured a comprehensive post on Google’s stance on the subject.

With Google’s stance on buying and selling links pretty clear now, how about the other major search engines? According to Google, they’re in agreement. On the Google Webmaster Central blog, Matt posted:

Q: Is this a Google-only issue?

A: No. All the major search engines have opposed buying and selling links that affect search engines. For the Forbes article, Google Purges The Payola, Andy Greenberg asked other search engines about their policies, and the results were unanimous. From the story:

Search engines hate this kind of paid-for popularity. Google’s Webmaster guidelines ban buying links just to pump search rankings. Other search engines including Ask, MSN, and Yahoo!, which mimic Google’s link-based search rankings, also discourage buying and selling links.

Search Engine Land wanted to hear from the other search engines first hand, however. Immediately after that blog post, Barry Schwartz asked them all for an official stance on these three questions:

1. What is your policy on buying paid links for ranking purposes. If you buy, what might you do?  
2. What is your policy on selling paid links for ranking purposes. If you sell, what might happen to you? 
3. And if you sell paid links, do you recommend using nofollow or routing through robots.txt?

To date, Microsoft and Yahoo have failed to respond despite follow-up requests. (Updated January 9: Microsoft has responded. See below.)

Ask.com said:

Trading links is a common practice on the Internet. Our primary focus is to distinguish high quality links from low quality ones regardless of whether they are paid or organic. We are not interested in penalizing sites that buy or sell links as long as the links are relevant and useful for searchers. And, we believe the ExpertRank algorithm is optimized to help identify quality links from those that would not contribute to the end-user experience.

While Google says you shouldn’t buy or sell links unless you use some type of link credit blocking mechanism like nofollow, Ask doesn’t care.

While we still await a direct response from Microsoft, We have received an official response from Microsoft, and there are other comments out there saying they don’t like paid links, though requirements for blocking these with nofollow are not mandated in those:

Earlier this month, Nathan Buggia of Microsoft’s Live Search Webmaster Center talked about paid links in a SEOmoz WhiteBoard Friday video and later commented in print:

Whether it is pay-per-post, paid links, or product placement in movies, if you’re not telling your audience you’re mixing in a dash of paid content into their organic soup, I think that it is eventually going to back fire.

Live Search’s Eytan Seidman recently said:

The reality is that most paid links are a.) obviously not objective and b.) very often irrelevant. If you are asking about those then the answer is absolutely there is a risk. We will not tolerate bogus links that add little value to the user experience and are effectively trying to game the system.

Ramez Naan of Microsoft’s Live Search has responded to our query with the following:

We think of links as a signal to ranking in as much as they reflect actual value to an end user. A link that is white text on white is obviously not valuable to the user, and if we detect such techniques we may disregard the link and may penalize the page it’s on. Paid links are a gray area. Are they of value to the end user? Sometimes they are. Often they’re less valuable and less relevant than the organic links on a page. We reserve the right to treat them that way.

It’s important for webmasters to keep in mind that search algorithms are constantly evolving. Given that, you should think more about the principles behind our ranking choices than the specific implementations we may have today. The core principle is: reward content and links that are valuable to the user. If you violate this principle, it may work out for you in the short term, but as algorithms get smarter it will work less and less, and may even backfire.

A second principle is: manipulating our algorithms in ways that does not add value to the end user is bad. If we detect such manipulation, we may disregard it, and may even penalize you. And again, our techniques for detecting manipulation improve every day.

As for Yahoo, it came out in support of nofollow when originally introduced, although the post specifically talked about comment spam, not paid links.

We’ll try again to get answers from the others (as of January 9th, only Yahoo! hasn’t replied) on our three questions. This being New Year’s Eve, we don’t expect they’ll come today, but hopefully they will in the near future.