Matt Cutts Revisits Google Rankings & Paid Links

Matt Cutts of Google has updated his blog post How to report paid links this weekend. The update has a lot more detail on Google’s view of paid links. Let me summarize for you the new additions to the post. Sites with paid links may lose their ability to pass link value to other pages […]

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Matt Cutts of Google has updated his blog post How to report paid links this weekend. The update has a lot more detail on Google’s view of paid links. Let me summarize for you the new additions to the post.

  • Sites with paid links may lose their ability to pass link value to other pages
  • Google may use “semi-automatic approaches to ignore paid links,” such as manual reviews, spam reports and so on
  • Not all paid links are bad, only those that “flow PageRank and attempt to game Google’s rankings”
  • Examples given of bad paid links include those that have links to pages that are not related and pages hiding the fact that they are paid links
  • Google still picks up on the two examples above, according to Matt
  • Google wants spam reports on paid links to better test, confirm and improve their algorithms
  • Directory links from directories that reject submissions, charge a fee and have quality listings in the directory should be fine
  • Don’t try to hide the links or make them “undetectable,” as Google will find them

That is my summary of Matt’s update to his post. Loren Baker posts a summary in more of a Q&A Style and V7N deserves the credit for noticing the update to the post.


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.

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