AmitBhawani.com Blog

As you guys know these was another PR update this week and many of your guys would have lost page rank because you were selling/buying text link adverts on your websites. Recently Matt Cutts linked to one of my blog post : Text Link Ads Sends Publisher Non Transparent Email , you can read the post in the following quote.
If guys have not yet stopped selling links on your websites (or) blogs you should just do it right away because Google can track it and you will lose your page rank if tracked.

Read Some interesting topics which can help you understand the situation:

1. Selling links that pass PageRank
2. Text links and PageRank
3. How to report paid links

MattCutts was referring to the post where text link ads [Text Link Advertising Company] was trying to make publishers show their sold links as normal Resource links and not as Sponsored links.
MattCutt’s Comment in Google Group

Craig, good points. I think a lot of regular users like seeing the green bits in the Google Toolbar, so getting rid of PageRank would be a large undertaking.

You asked “Why can’t they [paid links] just be ignored or otherwise dealt with?”

I think the short answer is that some folks try very hard to make their paid links hard to detect. For example, check out
http://www.amitbhawani.com/blog/text-link-ads-publisher-update/ to see an email from one text link broker to its publishers.

Check out this bullet point:

“- Our advertisers don’t like ad blocks that are titled “Sponsored Links” “Advertisements” “TLA” “Text Link Ads” etc. They prefer no
heading but if you do use a heading please consider using an image not text and consider using something like “Recommended Sites”.”

That email is asking link sellers to call things “Recommended” instead of “Sponsored,” or to use no header at all. And if you do use a header, they ask to make it an image (maybe because an image is harder to detect than text?). So some people appear to be actively working to try to make paid links harder to detect.
Matt

Craig’s Comment in Google Groups

I also thought Matt’s example was weak because it assumes people are stupid. As I said elsewhere, if a shonky car salesman wearing a Simpsons tie and a bad toupe manages to sell me a rustbucket with no brakes, it’s hardly his fault if I have a serious accident driving it away from the showroom.

True, but if someone had pointed you in the direction of that car salesman as being highly ranked among the possible sea of car
salesmen, you’d likely not be too impressed with that someone’s opinion.

Buyer beware and all that. My point was that I think it would be pretty obvious to most people that sites like the ones in Matt’s post are the online equivalent of used car salesmen and so I don’t think it was a strong argument for his case.

Right, but should Google highly rank a site like that? Of course not but if that site abuses what Google uses, in part, to rank sites or even to index them in the first place, where PageRank seems to be more important, it would seem that something needs to be done to weed out those kinds of sites.

The other problem is, Google can’t read. What may be obvious to you or I may not be so obvious to a bot.

I would hope that such crappy sites are filtered out by the algorithm before they gain any ground using paid reviews.

That would be nice but I think bots would have to become a lot smarter than they are currently because they would, in effect, have to evaluate content on its own merits which means they would have to understand what they are reading.

On the other hand, I’m with Halfdeck, and have been about as long as this whole paid link thing has been around. If site wide links can be detected and dealt with, excessive reciprocal linking detected and dealt with, spam-dexing links seemingly ignored, why can’t the same apply to paid links? Why can’t they just be ignored or otherwise dealt with?

I can understand the concept of devaluing one’s stripe of green bits to make the selling of links less profitable to those who do that but wouldn’t a simpler answer just be getting rid of the green bits?

Personally, I don’t really have a horse in this race. I don’t buy or sell links and in the areas that I use search, I’m mainly searching
among authority sites of which there are no equal so I don’t see a lot of link buying or selling influence so my point of view may be skewed.