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This great blog post has a huge discussion on paid links. Matt cutts google's senior quality engineer clearly points out that he doesn't like text link advertising done solely for the purpose of increasing link popularity.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-to-report-paid-links/
We can see both side of the arguments here
this post is interesting how the poster tries to defend the paid link side. please read that post to see some interesting conversations
| Quote: | So, first Google creates some sort of arbitrary site ranking system that is heavily based on backlinks.
Then it gets outraged that people start selling links to get better PR because Google has told us this arbitrary measurement will impact how sites are ranked in the SERPs.
Can anyone who came up with the original idea of PR, honestly say this wasn’t a predictable result?
Google has turned PR into a commodity and now decides that they don’t like that people are making money. Too late guys, that genie’s out of the bottle. A link to a site with a No-follow is a red flag to me that the link is not really honored by the site displaying it. It’s like saying, I’m putting this link because I have to, not because I believe in the site.
I believe that many paid links are nothing more than traditional advertising like has been done since the first newspaper was ever printed. How exactly does a site visitor know exactly what transpired for link placement and whether or not it is paid for? A website owner has every right to sell advertising on their site, just like every printed magazine, newspaper and even book does. Product placement has made millions for the movie industry by simply showing an actor using a particular product. Does a movie about WWII have any connection to Coca-Cola? Were the movie a website, would they need to be reported as a spammy site for having an advertisement for Coke?
There is a big difference between someone paying for a relevant link in a directory category or blog article and those who paid for placement sitewide on unrelated sites (regardless of the PR of the page the link appears on). I can only hope that this “spam reporting” of sites that accept/purchase paid links is targeting the obvious abuses of this rather than those that are simply part of doing business on the web. Why shouldn’t webmasters sell their website’s page space?
Should a high PR site on pets sell a sitewide link to a site selling umbrellas? Not really. If that’s the type of things Google is looking to make some changes in the algorithm to combat - I say go get ‘em. If Google is looking to end the ability for site owners to sell links on their pages - Google is being hypocritical and the entire page rank concept should simply be disbanded.
I agree with another poster that there needs to be some way to get true authority sites, like government and manufacturer’s higher in the SERPs. I am so tired of having to wade through all the hotel, city information, and other generic (and I have no doubt, highly profitable for Google) websites that ultimately have nothing of value about that small town of 500 I am looking to find information about. How can a generic city site be a more authority site than the town’s own government page or their Chamber of Commerce? Are we expected to believe that if site owners make the paid links to the bigger websites No-Follow that this will change? Or is this simply a way to go after the little guys selling advertising on their websites while those with huge budgets continue business as usual?
The fact that the reporting is to be done through the spam reporting section of Google is why so many are seeing this as leading to sites being somehow penalized. Again, how could the folks that make these decisions at Google, fail to see how many webmasters would interpret this placement?
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