Search Engine Forums, SEO Forum

I agree with you there is lot of noise on this issue as Matt Cutts a old employee of Goolge has raised this issue

I also agree that link buying solely for the purpose of transfering popularity or PR is a bad idea. I think there has to be a simple way to combat this and weed out the advertisers that do not even care if their ad is seen. I hope this does not ruin relevant text ads for the people who actually buy up the space for click throughs. It would be interesting to know if the major search engines are going to filter this type of advertising more.

...Google does consider buying text links for PageRank purposes to be outside our quality guidelines.

Can’t search engines detect paid links?” Yes, Google has a variety of algorithmic methods of detecting such links, and they work pretty well.

These are quotes posted by Matt Cutts at:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/text-links-and-pagerank/

Here are some tips that I have regarding things to avoid when buying text ads:

- If the ad section has the words "Sponsors" or "Advertisers" or such wording.
- The location of the ad. Sometimes the links on the footer of the website, might not get credit
- Site-wide or Run-of-site ads. A link in every single page of a publisher having hundreds of a pages, looks like an ad

I think there has to be a simple way to combat this and weed out the advertisers that do not even care if their ad is seen.

There is a simple way. Use the NOFOLLOW Tag

I don't think the idea of paid text links will ever die and here's why:

a) There are a lot of firms out there that make money on text links, but more importantly:

b) There is no way to detect every single paid link on a site. For example, how is Google or any search engine going to know if a link embedded on my site is paid or not, especially if you don't use the obvious "sponsor" or "paid advertisement" enclosure?

Granted, there are link building firms which make their inventory publicly available, so of course those links will be devalued, but not every LB firm does this. Therefore there is no way for an engine to know if a link is paid, nor who bought and sold the link.

Of course the "nofollow" tag would work so that link pop isn't transferred, however most people buy links for that reason - to build link pop.

Personally I don't see the problem with selling some link pop - after all Google has built itself on measuring link pop so why shouldn't successful sites take advantage of that? If I have a PR7 site and you want to buy a link from me, why can't I sell it to you and let you gain some benefit from it?

After all, our society is based on the ability to improve yourself whether you beg borrow or steal so to me buying and selling links is no different.

ibuildlinks wrote:I don't think the idea of paid text links will ever die and here's why:

a) There are a lot of firms out there that make money on text links, but more importantly:

b) There is no way to detect every single paid link on a site. For example, how is Google or any search engine going to know if a link embedded on my site is paid or not, especially if you don't use the obvious "sponsor" or "paid advertisement" enclosure?

Granted, there are link building firms which make their inventory publicly available, so of course those links will be devalued, but not every LB firm does this. Therefore there is no way for an engine to know if a link is paid, nor who bought and sold the link.

Of course the "nofollow" tag would work so that link pop isn't transferred, however most people buy links for that reason - to build link pop.

Personally I don't see the problem with selling some link pop - after all Google has built itself on measuring link pop so why shouldn't successful sites take advantage of that? If I have a PR7 site and you want to buy a link from me, why can't I sell it to you and let you gain some benefit from it?

After all, our society is based on the ability to improve yourself whether you beg borrow or steal so to me buying and selling links is no different.

fully informative case, guys. We build link pop