On-going Spotlight on Paid Links Issue
Posted: December 3rd, 2007
The focus on paid links and PageRank has taken center stage over the weekend, with all the changes made at Google’s end, along with the uproar on a variety of webmaster and SEO forums.
Folks over at Google admit that they are having difficulties in detecting and tracking paid links, which is why they ask that webmasters to report such instances. Matt Cutts explains how to report paid links on his blog. Essentially, they don’t want advertisers to purchase links from a website with a high PageRank, in the attempt to pass some of that PageRank to the advertisers’ site(s).
Matt Cutts and Maile Ohye go on to say that,
Such links can hurt relevance by causing:
- Inaccuracies: False popularity and links that are not fundamentally based on merit, relevance, or authority
- Inequities: Unfair advantage in our organic search results to websites with the biggest pocketbooks
A more recent move on Google’s part was to disapprove AdWords ads that mention the buying or selling of PageRank. You would think that such an easy adjustment would have been implemented much sooner, seeing that they have always disapproved of PageRank manipulation. But then again, this ranking system was created to generate revenue, after all.
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