It’s official. Google now penalizes sites that sport paid links. I gotta admit this kinda blows me away. A few thoughts:
- How does Google know if a link is paid or not? There’s nothing inherently different between a paid link and any other link on a site. i.e. on a blogroll. Paid links can only be determined on a case by case basis.
- If the above is the case then it just wows me to think that Google would be spending man power on stopping paid links but would (seemingly) ignore splogs and other spam websites that are chock-full of Google adsense.
- Paid links would seem to me to be a much smaller issue on the whole than, say, spam comments or trackbacks.
- What constitutes a “paid link?” Is only monetary renumeration considered “pay?” I ask because when I released unsleepable I put a link to my site in the footer. Does the Almighty Goog look down upon this too?
- What about pay-per-post or paid posts? These would seem to line up directly with what Google is taking a stand against.
Overall there’s really nothing anyone can do except bitch about Google. If you don’t like it then you have two options: worry feverishly and take your ads down; or ignore it and not worry about what Google ranks your site. Unfortunately for many sites the second option really isn’t one. Google has built itself up to such an extent that many sites rely on their Google ranking to produce income. Google has a stranglehold on the search engine market. I’m no SEO whiz but I know a little bit about how the system works. I tend to agree with what Adam said, that this is somewhat unfair on Google’s part and it’s an attempt to drive Text-Link-Ads, et al. out of their market. Of course, this is speculation on my part.
Will I be removing Text Link Ads from this site? Yes. Do I love Google at this point in time? No.
7 Comments
Interesting, isn\’t it? I thought you removed TLA ads from your site already. I see your PR stayed put, which is very, very good considering all that went down this week. 9rules, if you noticed, went from 8 to 4, according to my toolbar. Wow!
This game is almost like the stock market now … at least if you were planning to sell your site on the value of page rank. that\’s the equivalent of a share tanking.
I don\’t think WP Theme links should be a problem … Well, at least I hope not!
Yeah, it really is interesting. I had taken down the Text Link Ads before, that\’s correct. But it\’s a long story that I won\’t bore you with.
At any rate, I do find it interesting that 9rules seems to have substantially dropped.
I\’m still skeptical as to whether this is actually what is dropping people\’s PRs. It is assumption. Nothing in Google\’s policy says you can\’t have paid links, and I imagine, by law, that they would have to include that in their policy if they did such a thing, considering it affects people\’s income(s). Check out the following.
Why should I report paid links to Google? - \”Link-based analysis is an extremely useful way of measuring a site\’s value, and has greatly improved the quality of web search. Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of links count towards this rating….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…\”
A lot of people are breaking that \”nofollow\” rule, because they didn\’t know it existed. When everyone started assuming that Google was penalizing them, simply because of their paid links, I went to the source, and I ran across the article I linked to you there. I came to realize, upon looking at my source code, that TLA does not have a nofollow rel tag. I had to change from the WP plugin for TLA to the PHP file, so I could manually edit it. And even then, I have only done it on my main site index so far, because it was a pain in the arse to do. It\’s something TLA should do. I\’m disappointed that they weren\’t doing it all this time.
As for linking to yourself in your themes, again, use the nofollow tag. I learned this the hard way, but when I learned it, I understood it. I released a theme back in 2005, and my link was in the footer. A LOT of people ended up using my theme, and I came to see, very quickly, that a lot of low quality, if not spam quality, websites were using it. Google judges most things by link quality, but I would say many of us smaller sites still, despite our best efforts, pay attention to link quantity. When I started thinking of things from a quality perspective, I could understand why Google would want to penalize me. I had all these crappy websites linking to me, simply because they were using my theme. Now, if I\’d used the nofollow tag, I would have gotten the occasional, random traffic, from the link, but Google\’s bots would not have followed it from all the craptaculous websites to mine. I see reason in that, not cruelty.
I sometimes get angry on behalf of Google, I must admit. They do some things that I don\’t agree with totally, but by and large, they give the Internet what it wants, when it wants, etc. and for FREE. It\’s just that as Google has moved from being a college project to a multi-billion-dollar, international corporation, people have begun to misunderstand (if not just spread rumors about) Google and its practices; some, I would argue, also revolt whenever they see a company profit from its efforts (the old chestnut that money is bad, so the company must be too). That\’s rather sad, considering Google, in the scheme of multi-billion-dollar, international corporations, is a pretty damn innocent and transparent company, even when you read blogs like Google Blogoscoped. (Which, by the way, has news that YouTube currently has a PR of 3, so that should put to bed the theory that only small sites with paid links are having their PR change!)
The only reason everyone believes Google is penalizing paid links is because the idea has been repeated enough now, which is sad, because considering Google doesn\’t like to link its methods or algorithms, it\’s probably not going to ever discuss this with people. Even though it\’s policies already clearly state that paid links are fine and just need the nofollow tag. (Of course, no one\’s reading the FAQ, right? Why do that!)
All this said, I\’m glad to see Google changing PR. With so many sites on the Internet, PR\’s meaning has changed, or so I believe. PR has changed, up and down, in the past. The only reason people are panicking now is because the changes are a bit more drastic and going on for longer this time. Perhaps some will even come out with much lower PR than before. (But, I argue, if everyone comes out lower than before–as seems to be what\’s happening here–what will it matter? So what? So, then, we\’ll all be working for PRs above 5 and 6, rather than 7 and 8. Nothing but the concept of what a certain PR level stands for will have changed in such a scenario.) I think, however, that this will play out like in the past. Some people will have warped PR for a month or two, then it\’ll all go back to \”normal.\”
If you want your TLA back up, put it back up, just add in a nofollow tag in the PHP script of it.
And everybody, stay calm. 
Don\’t worreh. Be happeh.
Ahhh, sorry about that.
So that\’s why I went down to a PR of 4! That is so freaking stupid! I would like to keep the ads up because the extra cash really helps but what\’s the point of ads if no one freaking sees them because your PR goes down?
@Lelia: Of course, I agree with what you\’ve said. It makes sense that we should be concerned not only about the quantity but the quality of the links to our sites. I was actually under the impression that it was against TLA\’s TOS to put a rel=\”nofollow\” into the links they fed you. Perhaps I\’m wrong…
I went through the Publisher FAQ just now and couldn\’t find anything that makes it wrong. I did a site-wide search for \”nofollow,\” too and saw no mention of it in the entire site, so we should be safe.