$1,000 For A Link That Doesn’t Count In Google

September 27, 2006 – 7:48 am

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The saying a sucker is born every minute definitely applies on the internet. This time “savvy internet marketers” got caught with their pants down. According to Google MouthPiece Matt Cutts during an interview with John Battelle, paid links are almost always devalued. But I don’t get the impression that the process is done automatically, at all.

I’ve said this before in a few places, but I’m happy to clarify. Google does consider it a violation of our quality guidelines to sell links that affect search engines. If someone wanted to sell links purely for visitors, there are a myriad number of ways to do it that don’t affect search engines. You could have paid links do an internal redirect, and then block that redirecting page in robots.txt. You could add the rel=”nofollow” attribute to a link, which tells search engines that you can’t or don’t want to vouch for the destination of a link. The W3C decided to add a “INDEX, NOFOLLOW” meta tag to their sponsor page, which has the benefits that the sponsor page can show up in search engines and that users receive nice static links that they can click on, but search engines are not affected by the outlinks on that page. All of these approaches are perfectly fine ways to sell links, and are within our quality guidelines.

Too bad for the 146 Major Supporters of the W3C. Such luminary firms as “Wedding Favors”. LOL.

So I’m fascinated by these people who purchased text links for $1,000 (or more each), and now have absolutely no benefit from it. Obviously “Wedding Favors” was looking to rank for the term. Doing a search for the term in Google (as well as Yahoo and MSN) doesn’t show them in the Top 10 at all. Was the $1,000 spent an effective link buy? Heck no.

They could have spent $1,000 much more effectively, and not gone after the type of link they bought. First off, 146 “Major Supporters” means you’re getting 1/146th share from the link popularity. That’s too many links on one page for that kind of payment. Oh well, I guess they can live and learn. And talk about mixed signals from Google. On one hand they “can stop a page from passing PR”, and on the other they need the webmaster to flag the links as “paid”. Sounds like a highly ineffective method.

You can read the whole interview with Cutts. In it, he basically admits that Google can’t fight spam with algos and needs to add human intervention. We shall see.

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