14 URL factors in backlink profile analysis

The URLs of linking pages can tell you a great deal about a given site’s backlink profile. The URLs themselves can shed some light too when evaluating the quality of a given link prospect. Some of the link builders interviewed didn’t place value in URL analysis when investigating backlink profiles. Some did. Often, this comes down to differences in style and process.

1. TLD (if .govs or .edus have been linking it can indicate high-trust, high-value content)
2. Target keywords in the URL
3. Target keywords in the hostname
4. Number of URL parameters
5. Depth of the page on the site (as measured by /’s)
6. Iterations of ? and other extraneous characters
7. Excessive hyphens in a URL can indicate over-SEO’d content
8. URLS on blogspot or wordpress
9. Avoid https:// and ftp://
10. “links4free,” “getfreelinks,” etc…
11. The words “review” or “advertorial” (can indicate paid posts)
12. The linked-to site mentioned by name in the URL (can indicate a paid review)
13. Words that indicate content types (ie: “blog,” “news,” “forum,” etc…)
14. Excessive amounts of links.html and links.php indicates a weak profile

Key comments on URL factors

“Anything that indicates a news and information site is high on my list.” -Ken McGaffin, of WordTracker

“I’ll look for footprints that can help me find more link sources similar to that one.” -Gab Goldenberg, SEO ROI

“It is not something I spend time on. It is nice if their URL has keywords in it, but the link is valuable with or without that being the case. Other factors matter much, much more.” -Eric Enge, Stone Temple Consulting

“When reviewing URLs, one strict but useful criteria is to scrutinize any website that uses hyphens in conjunction with keyword phrases in their domain name. A little SEO knowledge can sometimes be like a sharp stick in the hands of a child. Hyphenated domain names can be an indicator that a webmaster is running around with a sharp stick.” -Roger Montti, aka MartiniBuster

“I’m looking for the presence of target keywords in file paths and names and at TLDs. I’m also looking to see if there’s an opportunity to purchase a similar domain name (in the case of exact match), with an alternate TLD.” -Ken Lyons, of Wordstream

“Even an ugly URL can get indexed, but you want to make sure that it’s the canonical URL for that page and that your link didn’t wind up on some duplicate page. It’s also preferable when the URL structure is clean and uses descriptive phrases.” -Jennifer Van Iderstyne of Search Slingshot

“To me, if a page is quality (i.e. relevant, has PR, dofollow, ranks well etc), then I don’t really care what the URL is.” -Melanie Nathan, Canadian SEO

“It’s more of what I DON’T look at. A URL itself can be an amazing source of signals, but more often, I look at URLs as a means to steer away from the junk.” -Eric Ward, EricWard.com

“If you see a lot of gardening-resources-7 or links.html near the top of their backlinks you know their profile is pretty weak.” -Aaron Wall, of SEOBook

“I look for things like keywords in the URL (more is good), URL parameters (fewer is good), and the depth of the directory (fewer slashes is good).” -Jeremy Bencken, of WebSimple

29 on-page factors in backlink profile analysis

When investigating backlink profiles, it’s vital to look at the pages that contain (or will contain) the link. Link builders consistently cited on-page analysis as a crucial element of backlink profile analysis.

1. Link embedded within relevant content that discusses link target
2. Title, headers, and content to see if the theme of the page is on topic
3. Text surrounding the link
4. Does the link appear paid or given freely, by editorial choice?
5. Does the page rank for its title?
6. Spam content in comments
7. The anchor text of the link
8. Page linked from other external websites
9. Proximity of the page to the root location
10. How well the page is linked to from within the website
11. The URL being Linked To (home page or deep)
12. Location of the link (on the page)
13. Number of outbound links on the page
14. Page Content (topic and amount)
15. Page back links
16. Page cache date
17. Pagerank
18. Quality of outbound links
19. Logical, appealing page layout
20. Page is bot-readable
21. Title and HX tags present?
22. Content buried under CSS and javascript?
23. Important page on the site vs. a “throw-away” blog post
24. Can you add directly to the discussion
25. Excessive advertising
26. Intent
27. Excessive links from link directories or blogrolls
28. Excessive links from links.php pages
29. Duplicate links on the same page (what is the first link’s anchor text?)

Key thoughts regarding on-page factors

“On page criteria is integral to the backlink analysis process. Outbound links are critical. It’s important to do a double backlink analysis. Analyze the backlinks of the sites your link candidate is linking to. This will help determine exactly what kind of link clique you are going to be associated with. Building a link clique independent from established link cliques is a way of combatting the established 800 pound gorillas that are entrenched in the top three. When you study the backlink of established sites you will generally see a relevancy pattern. Poaching from their backlinks only makes you a part of their sphere of influence. In my way of doing things, I aim to establish my own, and it has worked in overtaking websites that are a part of multi-million dollar networks for important two word keyword phrases. On page criteria is a key part of this process.

The ideal web page, in terms of on page factors, is a web page that has zero SEO fingerprints. Zero.”

-Roger Montti

“In general, I prefer to see a fairly decent pagerank (1-3 depending on how far down the page is in the site architecture) with a good amount of both external and internal links (can’t stress this point enough). Obviously relevancy is a must, but a more telling signs of a pages’ authority is its cache date; within one week is great, 1-2 weeks is average, 2-3 weeks is just OK, and anything 3+ weeks isn’t very powerful.” -Paul Teitelman, of Search Engine People

“The page must be closely geared towards my client’s target term or I don’t even bother. I want prospects where I don’t have to convince them to link; they just do it because it’s a logical fit. ” -Melanie Nathan

“A neat tool for quickly analyzing the value of getting a link once you’re on a page is Foxy Rank” -Tom Demers, of WordStream

“Is the link in the middle of content on the middle of the page, if not, take that into account. What other links are around it? Where do all the external links point out to on the page as a whole, are they relevant destinations to your site? Was this link added to the page after the fact or did it show up when the page was created?” -Brian Chappell, of Adapt Marketing

28 on-site or sitewide factors in backlink profile analysis

When analyzing a potential link prospect (or a key competitor) there are a number of sitewide inbound link factors to analyze.

1. Site type distribution of inbound linking sites (Blog, Directory, Social Media, Press Release, Website, ETC)
2. Domain age
3. Toolbar PageRank (both domain and linking page)
4. MozRank
5. Recency of the latest post or other newest content
6. Estimated traffic
7. Presence of social network widgets
8. Unique linking IPs
9. Unique IP blocks
10. Does the site rank for its domain name?
11. Does the site rank for its target terms?
12. Which pages of the site are getting the most links (helps to determine what has worked as link bait)
13. Unique link distribution (Unique IP Adresses, Unique IP Blocks)
14. PageRank distribution across site
15. Link Type Distribution (No-follow, Do-follow, Missing, Broken)
16. Reciprocal links
17. Number of indexed pages (gauges how SEO friendly their site architecture is)
18. Link accumulation speed
19. RSS subscribers
20. Human comments
21. Does the site have a logical structure and hierarchy?
22. Is it easy for a human and bot to navigate?
23. Hosting Location Distribution
24. The sites’ relevance to and focus on subject matter
25. Site using KWD rich internal anchor text
26. The total link count.
27. Does the site come up for country-specific searches in Google
28. Anchor text distribution

Key insights regarding on-site factors

“I look for evidence of human activity. I’ll want to see who writes the content and how dedicated to the task they are. I’ll also look at evidence of audience participation – do people leaves comments on articles for example. Once I’ve established in my head that it’s a quality site, I’ll look for opportunities such as ‘write for us’, ’submit an article’, ‘editorial guidelines’, etc. I’ll also look for partnership opportunities with sites I’m really taken with.” -Ken McGaffin

“We look at the website’s linking profile and overall strength of backlinks. Specifically, we look at deep links within a website we’re trying to acquire a link from for our client. If the homepage is very strong and the site has no deep links, then the value is typically lessened. The structure of the website and how strongly focused it is to the client’s business is the next best indicator for us. Is it easily spidered and indexed by Google. A quick way to see this would be to type in “site:widgetsite.com,” then look at not only the pages indexed, but also pay attention to the diversity of the title tags, descriptions, and URLs being indexed in Google. Stronger websites nearly always have a wider and more clear diversity while previewing the indexed pages from the website.” -Brian Gilley, of Social SEO

“A lot of the link stuff is recursive. So when you look at an individual page or site that someone is getting a link from sometimes you can also see where that site is getting links from and come up with new link building ideas based on that.” -Aaron Wall

Further reading:

• 30 Link Builders Discuss Backlink Analysis For Campaign Design – Part 1
• Paul Teitelman’s extended answers to the backlink profile analysis questions

Here is a complete list of our contributing link building experts. Thank you to all the contributors for their time and gracious contribution of hard-earned experience.

VigLink is in the news today primarily because the company has announced that it has closed a round of seed investment, for $800,000 in total. From the press release, funding sources include:

Google Ventures, and individual investors including LinkedIn Founder Reid Hoffman, longtime Google executive and current LinkedIn VP of Product Deep Nishar, and noted technology entrepreneurs Niel Robertson, Hadi Partovi, Ali Partovi, Carlos Cashman, and Micah Adler. The financing, which was co-led by First Round Capital and Google Ventures, will be used to accelerate VigLink’s market expansion.

At Search Engine Land, we don’t tend to focus on affiliate programs. But I felt VigLink was worth a closer look because of the Google involvement and because of questions the company’s program raises in terms of Google’s guidelines about paid links.

Google’s involvement is straight-forward. Google has a venture capital arm, Google Ventures. The company likes VigLink’s prospects enough that it has decided to back it with funding (how much isn’t disclosed).

On the paid links front, my understanding is that VigLink passes Google’s paid links requirements. I’ll get into that more, but first, how it works.

Install Code & Get Affiliated

VigLink provides code to those who are in its program. Similar to code used for something like Google Analytics, you insert this so that it’s present on every page.

The code reports to VigLink all the outbound links on your site — or specifically, all the outbound links that people are actually clicking on. If notes these links and checks to see if the companies the links lead to offer affiliate programs. If they do, then VigLink turns those links into affiliate links that earn you money.

VigLink’s demo page gives a real example of how this works. On that page, there’s a link to a book at Amazon called “Four Steps to the Epiphany.” The link in the page looks like this, if you hover over it:

http://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steven-Blank/dp/0976470705/

Click on that link from the demo page, and you’ll see how it looks like this in your browser’s address window:

http://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steven-Blank/dp/0976470705/?tag=vig-20&sid=151gu6ptz593e

That part I’ve put in bold? That tells Amazon that this person came from VigLink. If they buy something, then VigLink earns some money off the sale, since VigLink is an Amazon affiliate through the Amazon Associates program.

VigLink has enrolled itself in thousands of affiliate programs similar to those that Amazon offers. Anyone using VigLink code on their web site is effectively becoming part of VigLink. VigLink would look at your site, and if it sees a link to Amazon that doesn’t have an affiliate code on it, then it would add a tag to make it part of VigLink. The same is true for other online retailers such as eBay or TigerDirect.

Visitors to your site see none of this. If they hover over a link, they won’t see the affiliate code. Nor does VigLink operate like some of those programs like Vibrant that automatically try to make any word on your site. Only links that you’ve already created are turned into affiliate links, assuming there’s a relevant program.

Advantages

The plus side is the time savings. On my personal blog Daggle, for example, I link to things all the time. If I’m really thinking about it, I might add my Amazon affiliate code to a link to relevant information in something I’m writing. If I’m busy, I probably won’t bother. Other companies I link to might have affiliate programs, but it’s not worth my time or effort to sign up for those.

VigLink aims to correct such laziness. For example, I’m in the closed VigLink beta right now. I can see that in the week or so since I put the VigLink code up that I’ve had 53 clicks from my site over to Amazon. Of these, 47 clicks were on links where I had added affiliate codes. The other 6 clicks? I never added the code, but VigLink did it for me, using their code.

Similarly, I had nine clicks from my site to TigerDirect. I’m not a TigerDirect affiliate member. I have no affiliate code on those links. But by adding VigLink, it added its own code to those TigerDirect links, making them earn for me.

Now, I’ll earn more if I do affiliate links direct. VigLink takes a cut of any affiliate sales (how much varies and isn’t specifically disclosed, to my understanding). If you’re really worried about earning as much as possible, you’d want to do your own direct affiliate links. And if you do, VigLink recognizes these and doesn’t replace them, the company says. It only act on links where it sees a failed monetization opportunity.

Disadvantages

On the con side, the biggest is probably disclosure to your readers. When I affiliate a link, I usually make a note of this to my readers — and that’s something recent FTC guidelines now say is a requirement. VigLink suddenly makes any link on your site into one that requires disclosure. But since you don’t know which ones — and right now, since you can’t selectively choose which links might be affiliated — to cover yourself, you probably should have a blanket disclosure statement as part of your articles.

Another con is that the program doesn’t automatically find words or products that probably should be affiliated. If you write about a product but don’t link to it at some site, you’re not going to earn. In contrast, a program like Google AdSense tries to automatically look at your content and put ads near your content. And a program like Vibrant will actually turn words in your stories into links. Of course, many people find that type of word-to-link transformation annoying, myself included.

Paid Links & SEO Issues

From a search engine optimization perspective, VigLink seems a minefield. Google wants any paid link on a web site to be blocked from its crawler or flagged with a nofollow attribute, lest the site owner face a paid links penalty. VigLink potentially makes any existing link into a paid one, and site owners don’t know which, nor can they control the implementation.

Since VigLink uses JavaScript, there’s the potential that if Google does NOT read the JavaScript, it won’t see the paid links. That would mean the site is effectively getting a cloaked paid link. The search engine sees a non-paid one, but humans see a paid one. Arguably, this could be a guideline violation. Then again, since the site owner may not have deliberately set out to place a link in return for payment, Google might not view it that way.

If Google DOES read the JavaScript, as it does in some cases, then some of the links are definitely transformed into paid links — and currently, without any nofollow attribute attached to them, VigLink tells me. Some of them probably do not have redirect blocking that would make up for the lack of nofollow, so again, there’s a potential guidelines violation.

Google Gives All Clear

VigLink said it has talked closely with Google and been assured that its program will not cause site owners to violate paid link guidelines. I’m also waiting for a longer statement from Google. But Google also reassures me that it has seen the VigLink program, and it doesn’t pose any problems.

Other Issues

Another search marketing concern is the lack of control you have over where your site’s reputation can flow. Some sites want to ensure external sites receive get PageRank or reputation credit that’s typicaly passed through links. A program like VigLink, if done to Google’s paid link requirements, means that this credit is blocked. This isn’t the case within domains, by the way. VigLink says it never changes a link within the same domain or subdomain of a hosted site.

Long-term, if VigLink is successful and attracts imitators, the links that Google depends upon for much of its relevancy would be lost, since it wants to ignore any that are paid. Of course, affiliate links aren’t a new issue on this front. In the past, Google has suggested that there’s always enough of a sample of non-paid links for it to do good link analysis.

Ideally, I’d like to see site owners have much more precise control over what links get affiliated and which don’t. I’d also like to see VigLink insert nofollow attributes to links that are processed through JavaScript. Similarly, I think it should consider placing nofollow around any links on a page that it may make paid when the JavaScript processes.

CEO Oliver Roup told me last week these are all things that might happen in the future. But on the nofollow front, right now it’s not so pressing, since Google’s given the program a clean bill of health as things are now. As for granular control, VigLink says that if that comes as needed during the beta, it’ll happen afterward.

Of course, much of this is moot right now. VigLink is in a closed beta. You can’t sign up for it. You can, however, generate what’s called a “pre-sales” report. This is designed to show you links on your site that could be monetized by VigLink when it opens generally in the future.

Postscript: James Morell alerted me to Skimlinks, which seems to operate in the same way as Viglinks. I haven’t looked at Skimlinks in any great detail. In a quick visit, one key difference between it and Viglink is that Viglink says members get paid each month, regardless of how much they earn. Skimlinks says there’s a roughly $160 minimum earning needed in a month (50 UK pounds).

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

• 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.

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.