How to report paid links
One thing I heard at SES London was that people wanted a way to report paid links specifically. I’d like to get a few paid link reports anyway because I’m excited about trying some ideas here at Google to augment our existing algorithms. Google may provide a special form for paid link reports at some point, but in the mean time, here’s a couple of ways that anyone can use to report paid links:
- Sign in to Google’s webmaster console and use the authenticated spam report form, then include the word “paidlink” (all one word) in the text area of the spam report. If you use the authenticated form, you’ll need to sign in with a Google Account, but your report will carry more weight.
- Use the unauthenticated spam report form and make sure to include the word “paidlink” (all one word) in the text area of the spam report.
As far as the details, it can be pretty short. Something like “Example.com is selling links; here’s a page on example.com that demonstrates that” or “www.shadyseo.com is buying links. You can see the paid links on www.example.com/path/page.html” is all you need to mention. That will be enough for Google to start testing out some new techniques we’ve got — thanks!
Update, May 12th, 2007: I finally got some time to circle back around to this subject. I wanted to add an example or two of the sorts of reports that we’d be interested in getting, and try to answer a few questions about paid links. Let’s start with some questions.
Q: Can you give me some more background on how Google views paid links?
A: Absolutely. Start with this post from 2005. It’s a pretty good review of our policies at the time (e.g. link sellers can lose trust, such as their ability to flow PageRank/anchortext. Also, we’re open to semi-automatic approaches to ignore paid links, which could include the best of algorithmic and manual approaches.). You can also read about panels at search conferences where we did a site review and how much paid links stood out in a site review. I even mentioned earlier this year that paid articles/reviews/posts should be done in a way that doesn’t affect search engines. Here’s a post from January, for example, where I said:
Yet another “pay-for-blogging” (PFB) business launched, this time by Text Link Brokers. It should be clear from Google’s stance on paid text links, but if you are blogging and being paid by services like Pay Per Post, ReviewMe, or SponsoredReviews, links in those paid-for posts should be made in a way that doesn’t affect search engines. The rel=”nofollow” attribute is one way, but there are numerous other ways to do paid links that won’t affect search engines, e.g. doing an internal redirect through a url that is forbidden from crawling by robots.txt.
So this post shouldn’t be a surprise; it’s inline with our previous discussion of paid links. Some people wanted a way to report potential paid links and that was the main reason for this post.
Q: Now when you say “paid links,” what exactly do you mean by that? Do you view all paid links as potential violations of Google’s quality guidelines?
A: Good question. As someone working on quality and relevance at Google, my bottom-line concern is clean and relevant search results on Google. As such, I care about paid links that flow PageRank and attempt to game Google’s rankings. I’m not worried about links that are paid but don’t affect search engines. So when I say “paid links” it’s pretty safe to add in your head “paid links that flow PageRank and attempt to game Google’s rankings.”
Q: Can you give me an example of the sort of things you’d be interested in hearing about?
A: Sure. Here are some paid text links on a site dedicated to Linux:
There are a few interesting things about these links. If you take off your webmaster hat and put on a user hat for a minute, you quickly start asking yourself questions like “Why is a Linux site linking to a bunch of poker, pills, and gambling sites?” Users often consider links like this spammy or low-quality. I’m sure some people will happily defend links like these, but in my experience people who search on Google don’t want links like these to affect Google’s search results.
There are a couple other interesting things about these links. First, you can’t tell it from the image, but the “Sponsored Links” text in the example above is actually an image, not text. The rest of that site is very text-heavy, so the choice to make the “Sponsored Links” be an image is potentially trying to avoid detection of these links as paid. I can’t be sure that’s the reason, of course — maybe they just wanted that phrase to be pretty. The second interesting thing about these links is that our current approach to paid links worked quite well in this case. Our existing algorithms had already discounted these links without any people involved. However, our manual spamfighters had detected these links as well.
Q: So in addition to algorithms, Google has people who take action on spam?
A: Algorithms and algorithmic spamfighting are an essential way to improve Google’s quality, but Google does reserve the right to take manual action on spam (here’s a reference from 2004 where GoogleGuy, a search engine rep, said that Google can take manual action on spam). For example, if someone reports off-topic, keyword-stuffed porn for someone’s name, we do reserve the right to take manual action on that. In my personal opinion, Google’s philosophy on webspam is to look for scalable, robust approaches that improve our quality (with a heavy emphasis on algorithms). I did an interview last year with John Battelle where I gave my personal opinion in more detail.
Q: That paid link example was helpful. Can you give me another example?
A: Sure. This one also has “paid advertising” as an image, but our existing algorithms still discount these links:
Q: Okay, that example gives me a feel for the sort of paid links you’d like to hear about. What will you do with the new reports you get?
A: There are several ways that we intend to use the data. Our current algorithm detected the paid links above just fine, but these outside reports are a great way to measure (and then improve) the precision and recall of our existing algorithms on independent data. Next, the reports help build datasets for future algorithms. So the data helps us build the next generation of algorithms to improve quality. It also lets us work on new tools and techniques to improve how we detect paid links. Finally, we can investigate and take direct action on many reports that we receive.
Q: This is all well and fine, but I decide what to do on my site. I can do anything I want on it, including selling links.
A: You’re 100% right; you can do absolutely anything you want on your site. But in the same way, I believe Google has the right to do whatever we think is best (in our index, algorithms, or scoring) to return relevant results.
Q: It’s Google’s job to return clean/relevant results regardless of what people do on the web, so I don’t intend to send any feedback to Google.
A: You’re right, it is our job. If you’d rather not send any feedback to Google, I respect that decision. The primary intent of this post was to enable the people who did want to send us reports to do so. I appreciate when people do send us feedback, because that data helps Google improve its search quality and helps Google design new algorithms to give better results.
Q: Are you getting pretty good reports in response to this post?
A: Definitely. We’re getting a nice quantity of reports — I believe that we’ve gotten more paid link reports than there are comments on this thread. The quality is also high, in that many of the reports are pretty detailed. It’s also cool that (at least from a quick glance at our reports), a majority of the reports appear to be going to our authenticated form. I’m glad to see people using that form, because we can give those authenticated reports more weight.
Q: I’m worried that someone will buy links to my site and then report that.
A: We’ve always tried very hard to prevent site A from hurting site B. That’s why these reports aren’t being fed directly into algorithms, and are being used as the starting point rather than being used directly. You might also want to review the policy mentioned in my 2005 post (individual links can be discounted and sellers can lose their ability to pass on PageRank/anchortext/etc., which doesn’t allow site A to hurt site B).
Q: Are you interested in things like affiliate links? Are you interested in hearing about directories in this report?
A: Nope, I’d be most interested in feedback like the examples that I mentioned above, or things like paid posts that might affect search engines. If you’re still unsure what sort of reports we’d like to get, that’s okay. Fortunately, the vast majority of people sending in reports are on the same wavelength and are sending in solid feedback like the examples above.
Q: Hey, as long as we’re talking about directories, can you talk about the role of directories, some of whom charge for a reviewer to evaluate them?
A: I’ll try to give a few rules of thumb to think about when looking at a directory. When considering submitting to a directory, I’d ask questions like:
- Does the directory reject urls? If every url passes a review, the directory gets closer to just a list of links or a free-for-all link site.
- What is the quality of urls in the directory? Suppose a site rejects 25% of submissions, but the urls that are accepted/listed are still quite low-quality or spammy. That doesn’t speak well to the quality of the directory.
- If there is a fee, what’s the purpose of the fee? For a high-quality directory, the fee is primarily for the time/effort for someone to do a genuine evaluation of a url or site.
Those are a few factors I’d consider. If you put on your user hat and ask “Does this seem like a high-quality directory to me?” you can usually get a pretty good sense as well, or ask a few friends for their take on a particular directory.
Q: Google’s quality guidelines say “Make sites for users, not search engines.” Put that in context for me; how does that interact with buying links?
A: If someone is buying text links to try to rank higher on search engines, they’re already doing something intended more for search engines than for users. If you finish that guideline, you’ll see that it’s talking about doing radically different things for engines versus users (for example, cloaking or creating doorway pages). It would be a misinterpretation of that guideline to think “Okay, I can only do things for users, I can never do things for search engines. Therefore I can buy text links, but not in a way that doesn’t affect search engines.” That same philosophy would mean that you wouldn’t create a robots.txt file (users don’t check those), never make any meta tags (users don’t see meta tags), never create an XML sitemap file (users wouldn’t know about them), and wouldn’t create web pages that validate (users wouldn’t notice). Yet these are all great practices to do. So if you want to buy links, I’d buy them for users/traffic, not for PageRank/search engines.
Q: Suppose I didn’t want to read all the comments on this post. Did you post any other nuggets that I should be aware of?
A: Hmm. Well, someone did mention AdSense spam and so I reiterated how to report MFA or AdSense spam. I’ll quote that for folks that are interested:
If you see a spammy or made-for-AdSense site, do the following:
- Click on the “Ads by Google” link.
- At the bottom of the page, click on the “Send Google your thoughts on the site or the ads you just saw” link and fill out the form.
- When you fill out the form, at the bottom you’ll get to a section that says “Add additional information here:”. Include the word “spamreport” all in one word to make sure that the webspam team can see the feedback.
I don’t want any Google user to encounter spam, so please feel free to use Google’s authenticated spam report form for any other type of spam. We can also handle authenticated spam reports in several different languages.
Q: I kinda liked that nugget. Got any other interesting nuggets?
A: One rule of thumb is that if a link seller is talking about how hard it is to find a paid link or how paid links are made so that no one will know, that’s probably a bad sign to Google. For example, someone forwarded me an alleged email from one link seller that went like this:
Matt says they will try to find the links. This is where our service really cleans up ALL the competors! Google may be able to find the competition very easily (sitewide links are easy to spot), but our ads are too hard to find. Here’s why…
1. I have removed all identifying “buy here” items (ads/html/divs), making our ads hard to find.
…
4. Our service is not high profile, not flashy, not well known… making our ads hard to find.
…
Personally, when the link seller is talking about how a paid link is hard to find, that would worry me. (Yes, this was a different company than the post I did about undetectable paid links and spam earlier this year.)
Q: I don’t think paid links are the biggest threat to Google’s quality. I think technique X is having a bigger impact; why aren’t you tackling that?
A: It’s a safe assumption that Google’s webspam team is working on several different things at once. The posts I did in mid-April were mainly to reiterate Google’s stance on paid links and provide a way that people can give us feedback if they want. I hope that the examples above give an idea of the sort of things that people want to tell us about, and that we want to hear about.
- Hidden links
Most people understand hidden text is something like white text on a white background, and know to steer clear of it. Let me show you... - Text links and PageRank
In an earlier post I said that "The best links are not paid, or exchanged after out-of-the-blue emails–the best links are earned and given by... - Selling links that pass PageRank
I've talked quite a lot before about buying or selling links that pass PageRank. Today I wanted to walk through a concrete example of paid... - Two search tidbits
At SMX a couple weeks ago Eric Enge and I did a 20-25 minute interview. The interview transcript is now out in case you want...
Ash Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 3:37 pm
So is Google saying we can not sell links? or?
Aaron Nimocks Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 3:52 pm
Dont think thats a great idea. So does that mean I can go on adbrite, text-link-ads, payperpost, and reviewme then go report all those sites?
There needs to be a difference between selling text links for the sake of PR or SEO vs selling text links for advertising. This wont be easy to determine so I think its a horrible idea.
mad4 Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 3:59 pm
Heres one for you to start on.
http://www.forbes.com/mesothelioma_attorney.html
What is Google going to actually do to people who buy & sell links and forget to use nofollow? Penalties? Devaluing of all their links? Discounting of only the paid links?
I think we need to know where this is heading before people start firing off reports on who just paid $10 for a blogroll link.
Justice McCay Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 3:59 pm
I don’t think this is a smart idea for a second.
Why? Well simply put online businesses will now be able to knock out the competition just by making some false reports.
There needs to be a better way for this. Selling links isn’t necessarily spam, either. =\
Your own company does it through it’s advertising network!
Jeffrey Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 4:02 pm
Cool! I will quickly buy some links for my competitors on text link ads and then denounce him. Good idea, thanks Matt.
JohnMu Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 4:03 pm
How can I tell if a link is “paid”? What if it’s just a helper for a friend (paid in form of a beer)? Are links on a web-designer’s homepage to their clients paid? Are general links to your clients paid (eg “buy my service/product and I’ll link to you - your site will be better off”)?
What will happen to the person with the links on their page? Are we getting the publisher penalized or are the links just going to be ignored (”penalty” for the advertiser)? There’s a big difference and I’m sure it will matter. If the publisher is going to get penalized many people (especially those reading your blog :-)) will think twice about reporting such a link. If the link is just discounted then it’s a whole different story.
I’m kinda worried about this move …
Chaaban Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 4:05 pm
wow ,
is this another 1th of April fool day joke ?
Things are starting to be messy over here
Andy Beal Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 4:07 pm
How many more trojan horses Matt? Nofollow was supposed to help us point out links we can’t vouch for, now Google wants us to use it on paid links. Now, the spam report - which we thought was supposed to be used for reporting spam activity - is to be used to report “suspected” paid links?
What’s next? Asking us to share our Google Analytics data so you can weed out the pages that users don’t find interesting?
With all due respect, this is going too far!
Michael VanDeMar Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 4:16 pm
It has to be a joke. There’s no way Google would take someone else’s report of legitimate advertising on a site as spam. I’ve seen the rumors on what kind of intelligence they look for when hiring Google employees. Like we’d actually believe that someone smart would come up with an idea like that!
Heh! Good one Matt! I mean, it’s a little belated, and you probably should have just stuck with the “my blog’s been hacked!” gig, but kudos for trying to pull one off 2 weeks after the fact.
Jeff Selby Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 4:17 pm
I agree how will you tell if there paid or not, and is there a penalty on this or is the link just ignored. Just as an example the yahoo directory is all paid links so what happens with them.
stuart Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 4:27 pm
If the links are relevant to the readers, and are clearly marked as sponsored links, I don’t understand what the problem is.
I’ve got a travel website and are currently running paid links (via Text-Link-Ads) which are linked to an airfare website. The links are under a heading reading “Sponsored links” so it is clear that these links are paid advertisements - I’m at a loss as to why I should be penalised for something like this.
If I ran the links for free would I still be up for a penalty?
Parminder Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 4:32 pm
I have submitted my site to a few paid directories
am I gonna get banned coz of that 
I read at google itself that directory submission was alright and it did say submit to yahoo directory which is paid aswell and I can still see that text there ..
BigBadWolf Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 4:36 pm
I have to admit that sounds pretty stupid to me… So people will just look at their competitors High PR backlinks and “guestimate” that they probably paid for them and everyone will be reporting everyone else that ranks higher than them. Yippee back to kindergarten and tattle-tailing everytime someone is beating you in the rankings.
IMO Google needs to get its act together on more important features like the REAL spam report, I have reported (weeks ago!) a group of hackers that are hacking several unmaintained sites and some governmental ones too dumping hidden links on them to boost their casino affiliate site but no one at Google seems to care….
Regards
Golfer Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 4:40 pm
Hey Matt,
I was one of the many people lucky enough to meet you at SES London. In fact I was one of a number of people who specifically mentioned the subject of ‘paid links’ to you.
I’d just like to say that it is great that yourself and Google actually listen to mere mortals like us and take action to improve your services where possible.
Thanks again.
Matt Cutts Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 4:41 pm
Ash, there’s absolutely no problem with selling links for traffic (as opposed to PageRank). At http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/hidden-links/ I mention a couple ways to sell links that Google would have no problem with.
Aaron Nimocks, I believe AdBrite constructs their links with JavaScript so that links are being sold for traffic, not to affect search engines. Things like JavaScript, the nofollow attribute (or meta tag), or doing a link through a redirect that is robots.txt’ed out would be techniques to sell links for visitors/traffic, as opposed to trying to influence search engine rankings.
Justice McCay, these spam reports won’t directly cause a site to go down. We’re going to use these external reports to test out some new techniques.
JohnMu, we’re looking to collect data for a new approach or two that we’re exploring, so I’m happy to receive pretty clear-cut reports right now.
Chaaban, nope, definitely not an April Fool’s joke.
We’ve got a lot of data within Google already, but I wanted to put out a call for external reports to widen the set of data that we can test on.
Andy Beal and Michael VanDeMar, in the old days some people objected to the idea of a spam report form altogether. Over time, the spam report form became less controversial as people grew more comfortable with the idea of reporting problems and giving feedback to a search engine. Google has often used specific keywords in the past to let people report issues via the spam report form.
Jeff Selby Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 4:48 pm
One question so will the buyer or the seller of a link you think is a paid for be penalized or will the link just not be counted? I can understand not counting the link or passing rank but penalizing is another thing.
scott Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 4:48 pm
Matt,
OK, so what you are saying is you want to shut down every paid directory and all forms of advertising except for Adwords. On top of all that, you want us to do the work for you?
Isn’t that just shooting ourselves in the foot if we decide to help you? I mean all the work we put into our sites to get quality links would end up being just wasted time, as those links may not count now.
Why is it only OK for Goog to get paid for advertising and no one else? The people buying advertising or selling advertising will now be penalized for maximizing their revenue, but that is how Goog makes its money. I am sorry but this is hypocrisy.
If you are so worried about the quality of your index then may I suggest you use something other than links to judge relevancy and quality of the website. Perhaps content and up to date material should count more.
Just be straight with everyone and tell us that you only want us to advertise using Adwords.
Matt Cutts Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 4:56 pm
BigBadWolf, is there a specific string/keyword/phrase you used in reports that I could use to look up the spam report you did?
Golfer, happy to help. I enjoyed talking to folks at SES London.
Jeff Selby, right now I’m just looking to increase the size of the dataset that we’re running some tests on.
JohnMu Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 4:58 pm
I’m still not certain - you want us to report every instance of sold links (eg paid banners, footer links, etc) that we can find? You might as well search for “powered by phpbb” or any of the other common easy-to-use CMS systems. Soooo many sites have paid banners in some form or other. If we do report them (because they’re clueless and won’t read our mails) and they get deindexed, should we have a bad conscience? (maybe
- but for them it’s serious). Can we expect some official communication from Google about this that we can send them as a link?
If I have an open-source project and link to the contributor’s websites (even if they’re unrelated), is that a form of a paid link (work for link)?
(I have to admit I find this whole idea more than a little bit frightening)
Nikhil Jogia Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 4:58 pm
The other thing is, what if a business sponsors a forum and gets a link out of it? Should we say that this link hasn’t been earnt the same way that “writing good quality content” earns a link?
Without the sponsorship that allows for hosting to be paid for, that in turn, allows people to create quality content, there would be no content for Google to index.
I know one forum I frequent has no advertising except for a link to a web host. This forum is very large (150000+ members, 11,000,000+ posts), and without the support from the web host from the very beginning, there’d be nothing.
bwb Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 5:03 pm
Big sigh, this is not a good move.
Scott Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 5:11 pm
I think this is a good idea. It will help make the results so much better. There are these issues though: How will you be able to tell paid and non paid links apart? How would could you stop someone that didn’t like you from posting a link then reporting you?
If you can solve those two issues then this will work out great for the search results.
Scott
BigBadWolf Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 5:15 pm
Matt you can contact me via the email that I’m using to post here and I can send you all the details you need, or I can post the URL here if you like.
sammie Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 5:16 pm
is it just me or did anyone else spot matt skipping this post?
#
Jeffrey Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 4:02 pm
Cool! I will quickly buy some links for my competitors on text link ads and then denounce him. Good idea, thanks Matt.
———————
what about this? this is going to get Google neck deep in angry webmasters
and it is the webmasters that keep Google in business.
or is google planning to be the only one to sell links on the WWW
sammie
JJ Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 5:41 pm
“Golfer, happy to help. I enjoyed talking to folks at SES London - Matt”
Ok then let’s start reporting people selling text links from London
Halfdeck Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 5:54 pm
SEOs will be out of a job without the ability to buy links. Not a good move Matt
“If I ran the links for free would I still be up for a penalty?”
Obviously not. But more importantly, if you weren’t getting paid, would you still be running those links on your site?
I thought not.
graywolf Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 6:01 pm
Sheesh with all those people you guys keep hiring and companies you keep buying I wouldn’t think you’d need to exploit people for free, doing the work your algo is supposed to be doing. It’s not like Google doesn’t have the cash lying around.
logadmin Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 6:02 pm
Matt, We know how to report you paid links. You showed us how Google reduce the impact of googlebombs, but ¿What do you think about the SEO contests like habitaquo?
http://www.technorati.com/wtf/habitaquo
Thanks.
Carsten Cumbrowski Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 6:05 pm
I should get used to writing comments outside the form again. I jut lost the content I wrote because a windows up decided to reload the page. Anyway, I will not write everything again, but maybe it is better this way, keeps it shorter.
Googgle’s shift of the discussion from “purpose of the link” to “is it a paid link or not” is a step backwards IMO.
If you would have to rate each link on a site by the following three properties that express intend on a sliding scale, then you would get a lot of combinations back, which would actually reflect the real intention of the Webmaster more accurately.
I kept relevance out of it on purpose, because that is a different issue IMO. You can use the results of the determination of the relevance to check if it does not conflict the values determined or specified for the intention of course.
(B) Personal Benefit: 0 - 10
from 0 = don’t see a dime, over 1-9 = get commission/some sponsorship to 10 = get paid a chunk of money for the location, target and anchor text of the link
(S) SEO Intention: 0 - 10
from 0 = “SEO, what? Google, who?” over 1-9 = “it helps a bit with the SEs” to 10 = “SEO Baby, yeah”
which are both being offset by
(E) Endorsement: 0 - 10
from 0 = “no endorsement/not reviewed yet (links added by others)” over 1-9 = “does not hurt to check out/advertising/good stuff” to 10 = “Love it. Best thing since sliced bread”
Some results should make the link being ignored completely and even reflect poorly on the webmaster, some should get full voting power and even extra power for B=0, S=0, E=10 ratings for example and everything in between depending on decisions made by the SE.
How to get the ratings is the tricky part, “nofollow” alone will not cut it. Forcing the addition of “nofollow” to a link that has a high value for Endorsement, but also a value for Personal Benefit and or SEO Intention would be wrong and dilute the accuracy of search results, make them less relevant, because they have the word “lie” and “censorship” written all over them for a large number of search terms, especially commercial terms that are related to online services and e-commerce.
If you go on with “threatening” webmasters and force them to do something that does not reflect their opinion, be at least clear about what you want to impose on them. A 100% clear definition of “paid link” would be a start. Is a link that generates commission for referrals a paid link? If you link to a sponsor who supports your cause financially, is it a paid link? etc.
Webmasters that boycott this and rather express their opinion honestly than lie about it, only to make Google happy, would like to know what ethical perfectly okay action is getting them banned.
It would be bad enough if your answer to my questions above is yes, because you effectively deny webmasters the right to state that a link is an endorsement and vote for the linked to page, by threaten them to get them banned if they don’t deny the vote, because they also get financial benefits from the link as well.
All this to just make it easy for you to “fix” some of your problems in figuring out the webmasters real intention, is bad.
I am painting the worst case scenario here, because blind believe that you don’t have to fear anything from Google if you don’t do anything “wrong” does not cut it for me anymore.
That trust got lost over 2 years ago.
That is what you get, if you are avoid being very clear and specific and issue vague warnings that have a too much room of interpretation and makes people that believe they do the right thing think that you are talking to them and not just to search engine spammers.
You have now the change to clarify some of the items and provide some insights about Google’s reasoning and position to those things.
Note: My tone is harsh, but I want to make clear that this is not meant personal or that I don’t even imply that you are doing or not doing things. I respect you professionally, but there are some problems that needs to be discussed, straight forward and honest. Avoiding and/or ignoring them does not help anybody.
Thanks Matt.
Craig Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 6:25 pm
Correct me I am wrong, but where did Matt or anyone from Google say that sites that buy paid links will get a penalty. I just thought they would not have the link counted. If this is the case why the silly comments about buying links to competitors sites to get them a penalty?
Matt Cutts Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 6:44 pm
JohnMu, this is a feedback method that people can use, but I wouldn’t worry about using it if you’re unsure. This is to help people that do want to give feedback. Several people have asked for this, so I wanted to provide a standard way that people could use.
Nikhil Jogia, I’m most interested in directly paid-for links right now. I’m happy to hear about other types of situations though.
BigBadWolf, I dropped you an email.
“SEOs will be out of a job without the ability to buy links.” I don’t agree with that, Halfdeck — I think you might be joking a little bit, too.
SEOs add value in a ton of ways. A good example is Neil Patel getting a 20% bump in Calcanis’ traffic just by doing good old-fashioned SEO: http://www.pronetadvertising.com/articles/calacanis-seos-next-evangelist0307.html
None of that involved buying links, I believe.
graywolf, I think other internet companies benefit from their users’ interactions. Yahoo has got Yahoo Answers, people write reviews on Amazon, people rate sellers on eBay. If anything, I’d say that Google should be doing more to help users improve our quality.
logadmin, we definitely pay attention to SEO contests. Personally, I think it’s interesting to see which techniques people try to use. The SEO contests that I like the least are for actual words, as opposed to made up or nonsense words.
Humor Website Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 7:13 pm
I dont think this is true,but if it is then google are starting to control
all webmasters by telling them what to have on their own websites and what not.
I know we all wish that google gets stronger competition from eithor
msn or yahoo and i cant wait for it
Moe Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 7:28 pm
Matt I’m a first time poster to your blog. Basically the story is like this. I have a small website that I’ve sold some links on before originally to pay for hosting bills, as the site rose in ranking for a term I now admit to make a some money off of.
When I accept payment for a link, it is for a review of the site. I never accepted poor sites or spam. Only quality related theme sites that I wouldn’t mind linking to and showing to my visitors. I also always placed them as Sponsers Links. Any site I believed was spam I would not list and refunded the payer’s money
I just have some questions, sorry if they were asked before:
Now are you saying these type of links that I have accepted are spam and that my site can recieve a penalty? How is this different from directories such as yahoo? Is the penalty a drop in rankings?
I’m probably willing to try the redirect to a robot.txt, but I don’t have one of those, (how do you set it up? robot, redirect, etc) and the reason I’m a bit hesitant because as I learn more about seo I have learned the advertisers I’ve accepted probably does advertise for other reasons besides traffic, and if I add a no-follow they might leave.
Thanks for your time
Aaron Pratt Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 7:29 pm
This is one of those “enough said” moments, thanks Matt!
Dave (Original) Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 7:58 pm
I certainly hope Google can soon detect paid links and take appropriate action.
RE: “A good example is Neil Patel getting a 20% bump in Calcanis’ traffic just by doing good old-fashioned SEO: ”
==========================================
Matt, how do you *know* that no link buying was/is invloved? I ask as they advertise one of BIGGEST link mongers out there (Text Link Ads) it would seem all was not white hat. The fact alone they adertise them speaks volumes IMO.
Text Link Ads prominetly promote their service as;
“Text Link Ads are served as static links that can help your natural (organic) search engine rankings”
http://www.text-link-ads.com/textlinkads.php
SEW and many other popular “SEO” forums (who know full well that’s it’s against Google’s guidelines) are proudly $affiliated$ with Text Link Ads and MANY other link mongers & black hats.
Joseph Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 8:39 pm
Why would anyone want to be a rat for Google? An unpaid rat at that…
Multi-Worded Adam Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 8:43 pm
Hey Matt, email me your address. I want to send you a crash helmet for your birthday or Christmas. That way, when you read all of the drivel and nonsense that’s bound to come out of this and you start bashing your head off the wall, you won’t hurt yourself.
To everyone else: do you not think you’re all jumping the gun just a little bit here? Stand back and look at the situation objectively for a second.
What information do we have? Google wants to know where we see paid links.
What other information do we have? Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Zero. Bupkes.
So…what do we do? We all assume the worst gather around like a bunch of bloodthirsty sharks to circle around Matt and whoever else might get caught in the crossfire.
Nobody said that people would get banned for advertising.
Nobody said that Google was going to start major revisions of the algorithm that would make the world fall off its axis.
Hell, no one even said anything would happen at all!
Not only that, who says that Google doesn’t already have a large portion of this information gathered? It wouldn’t be that hard to pick out a common affiliate link or an ad network script or whatever from the code. If they haven’t already gotten this stuff, it wouldn’t be all that hard for them to get some of the more common stuff…and that’s assuming they haven’t already gotten it (which Matt said they did, and I tend to believe him.)
Matt: what exactly are you looking for in terms of paid links? Affiliate links? PPC links? CPM? Pay $30 for the year and your link will be featured on somedirectorysite.com? Silly schemes like the v7n.com one? Legit stuff? Illegit stuff? Both? Does it matter?
I’m thinking if you listed off some of the examples of things you were after, it might clear things up…it would for me, anyway. The problem with paid links is that it covers a fairly broad spectrum of advertising ideas and techniques.
That, and not having the spam form used for this if it’s not a spam technique…that’s just a geek PR (as in Public Relations, not PageRank for the search-engine-optimization-obsessed, or SEOO for short) disaster waiting to happen.
Matt Cutts Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 8:45 pm
Aaron Pratt, I just wanted to be around in case people had questions, but I’m about to go get dinner.
Dave (Original), Neil talked about the specific changes that he did here:
http://www.webpronews.com/blogtalk/2007/03/29/patels-calacanis-challenge-update
It was mostly things like tweaking post titles and meta descriptions.
Michael VanDeMar Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 9:00 pm
@Carsten Cumbrowski - that was the short version…?
@Matt - I am not against the spam form, or reporting spam. However, if you were to take the number of legitimate results that are being unjustly lowered due some webmasters purchasing links for ranking benefit, and then compare that to the amount of real spam that Google currently has in it index, then it should be apparent that spending any time, and I do mean any at all, on this issue means that your priorities are, well… whacked.
Honestly, Matt… and if your legal team won’t let you answer this, then I understand, but if you are allowed to answer then I (and I’m sure others) would really, really like to know… as the G algo stands now, exactly how much off balance would you say it is due to the insidious act of buying and selling text link ads? How many man hours have you spent combating this crime against humanity, and at what cost? And is it seriously skewing the results that much, that all the efforts spent on it were, and continue to be, justified? Is the algo that fragile?
The other main reason that I disagree with this idea is that you think (or appear to be implying, anyways) that Paid Link === No Human Review. This not the case 9 times out of 10. You should know that.
RogerJ Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 9:40 pm
“…it should be apparent that spending any time, and I do mean any at all, on this issue means that your priorities are, well… whacked.”
I can’t think of a single situation where a paid link should pass PR. For that reason I see this as a good step towards better serp quality.
You seem to imply it has a minimal impact on serps. Do you think people would be shelling out thousands of dollars for PR8+ links if that was the case? The only people who would complain about this enhancement have a vested interest in buying or selling links as far as I’m concerned, as there is nothing but benefit for end-user searchers.
Matt Cutts Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 9:46 pm
Michael VanDeMar, be nice to Carsten.
We prioritize what to look at in search quality and webspam the best we can.
Scott Fish Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 10:13 pm
Longterm link awareness
If a website is built to last, which most should be anyways, couldn’t you argue that legit outbound links today shouldn’t be affected by the decision to sell links in, let’s say, 5 years? - It seems to me that by disclosing that you sell links in 5 years, that Google may not able to decipher which links have been paid for and which ones aren’t. Granted Google knows the age of links, but by simply saying on your site that links are paid for, this seems like it would discredit all outbound links in a general sense.
Site structure issues
Websites have changed in structure over the past few years; consider a static website vs. a blog. Many years ago, someone may have sold links on their home page or a category page, while today someone may sell links within a blog post. To me, those are 2 separate things, and is Google smart enough to know that a paid link within a post is different than my next blog post with outbound links to my new favorite website?
PageRank vs. Traffic
I recently bought a link on a well known site’s subcategory that relates to one of my sites, undoubtedly others buy links on that site as well. The difference is that I bought the links in order to get on-theme, and targeted traffic, while others may have bought links simply for the PageRank Boost. How will Google know the difference? - will my site be penalize just because someone submitted a report that the site is selling links?
Dave (Original) Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 10:30 pm
Matt, it seems to me that ANY site would increase in rankings IF they have no Meta descriptions and non-descriptive/non-relevant page Titles and then fixed it. Bit like saying an example of a good mechanic is one that puts some air in your flat tyres
While I cannot prove it beyond doubt, it would seem to me that all the links to the site is what really got the site 90% of the way, the tweaking was simply some icing on the cake. Again, while I can’t prove it, I would say the site owner has/is buying links for ranking.
Why doesn’t Google put a 6 step guide to long term ranking in Google? In my mind it would be something like;
1) Content. Write good content for your target audience.
2) Ensure the page Title accurately & concisely describes your page content.
3) Ensure the page Meta description accurately & concisely describes your page content in a slightly longer form of your page Title.
4) Contruct pages in logical manner for human reading.
5) Don’t be afraid to link out to other relevant pages (your site & others) if the linked page will be of use to your visitors. If unsure, use nofollow. We (Google) link to over 10 billion other pages
6) If you get an email to exchange links and the site is not within your target audience, delete it. Only exchange links with relevant pages if they will be of use to your target audience. If unsure, use nofollow and never expect any boost in ranking from exchanging links or other forms of self promotion.
Harith Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 10:38 pm
Matt
I’m very glad to see you pay much needed attention to Backlinks Merchants.
You may wish to consider adding a specific line under “Tool” to report paidlinks. Something like:
Tools
Download data for all sites
Report spam in our index
Report Paid Links
Submit a reinclusion request
That will be a big help to webmasters to see where exactly to report paid links. And it will have additional value; signaling that Google is serious in fightingback on paid links.
Matt Cutts Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 10:44 pm
Harith, that’s a good suggestion. We’ve talked about doing something like that.
Dave (Original), that’s a pretty good list for beginners; I’d imagine that the first several points there are completely uncontroversial. We do provide some info along those lines at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/
Jayson Joseph Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 10:49 pm
Good move, matt. I think Google should have acted a bit early. The paid link schemes have already polluted search results in many cases.
Dave (Original) Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 11:15 pm
Thanks Matt. While they are mixed and spread about on the pages your mention, it would be nice to have a single page that those who frequent SEO forums can simply link to.
My reasoning is; those who offer black hat advice can be contradicted without any doubt by the OP or others who read the Threads.
I also believe it would go some way torwards letting unwary Webmasters (the vast majority) know that SEO is not rocket science and most SEO have a vested interest in promoting and charging as such.
LaCabra Said,
April 14, 2007 @ 11:29 pm
Dear Matt,
I’m going to be very direct and hope you can appreciate what I am about to say.
I find it quite interesting that Google is trying to tackle the “paid link” problem, yet for 3 years I have complained and submitted spam reports regarding some blatant violations (3 different URLs ,owned by by a publically traded company, with the exact page content on all URLs - ie: styles,graphics,copy) and have yet to see ANYTHING done about it.
Furthermore, your PageRank (PR) algo is completely flawed. Although the intial concept was valid and remains such,”the importance of a page”, Google has managed to create a commodity out of PageRank. People buy and sell links based on PageRank “vanity”. I see MFA sites with higher PRs than sites owned by govermental bodies or associations. I can’t understand how your algo can’t differentiate between MFA sites and sites of governing bodies in a particular niche and assign PR based on their true merit and status.
Additional, as back-links are a major factor in the Google SERPs algo, Google is once again creating a commodity. There are literally dozens of schemes and networks out there promoting link building (paid and free). Folks are gaming social sites in order to game the Google algo. Unfortunately I can’t see it changing for the better. Do you have any idea as to how many useless link directories are out there and being launched daily? Thats a dirrevative of the Google algo! How about Tags/Cloud sites?
Spend a little time on Yahoo … you will see that their SERPs are substantially better now than G’s SERPs!
If you are so inclined to investigate the issue discussed in my first paragraph, please feel free to email me.
Everett Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 12:39 am
Matt, I humbly request that you please change the language of your request for people to report paid links, to “report automated paid links” or something more along those lines.
I understand that the goal is to allow everyone - from the small mom-n-pop hobby site, to the large corporate mega-sites - to have an equal chance at showing up for a search query on Google.
However, it is my view that this assumption is fundamentally flawed. Here’s why:
#1 Large corporate sites already have a huge advantage over smaller sites, no matter how good the content on the smaller site is. Their brand recognition alone makes it more likely that they will receive more incoming links. So giving smaller sites the ability to purchase a human-reviewed, page-rank-passing listing actually levels the playing field more than dissalowing the practice completely.
#2 If someone asks you to link to them, it is reasonable for you to request compensation for the time and effort it takes to review their site and consider linking to it. Nobody likes to work for free. And just because you do not work for free, does not mean that you don’t “vouch” for the site should you end up linking to it from your directory, sponsored link section, or even within the body content of one of your pages.
IMPORTANT: I am referring to human-reviewed links from websites that actually take the time to check out the quality of the submitting site. The submitting site doesn’t have to be a big name, have the best content, or a good design. The point is that someone has looked at it to make sure they are not trying to rip people off, serve up meaningless content (as in incoherent scraper sites), promote illegal goods and services, or utilize spamming techniques.
If a website is serious enough about the success of their business to pay a listing review fee, and the reviewer finds their content to be of some value, what the heck is the problem with passing page rank through on the link? The link buyer is being proactive like any good business person, and the seller gets compensated for their time, bandwidth and other assets, such as their own hard-earned Page Rank. So again, what is the problem?
Please change your language so people understand that buying and selling human-reviewed links is a legitimate way to increase traffic, brand awareness and, yes, even Page Rank.
By the way, unwise webmasters who have a rubber-stamp policy when it comes to reviewing links are hurting the reputation of their own website, both in the eyes of the visitor and the search engine. If they want to do that, let them. It is their business mistake to make, and I would hope that your algorithm can at least see this type of site for what it is instead of punishing everyone for the misdeeds of some.
Everett Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 12:44 am
“I understand that the goal is to allow everyone - from the small mom-n-pop hobby site, to the large corporate mega-sites - to have an equal chance at showing up for a search query on Google.”
I should have added “…as long as they have quality content and provide useful (or at least entertaining) information, goods or services.”
The point is, we all know that you want a site ranked on its merit, rather than how much money it spends on links. I would like my President to be ranked on his merit, rather than the money he spends on a campaign. We both know this isn’t going to happen, so let’s stop being idealistic and start tacking the problem realistically.
Dr. David Klein Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 12:59 am
Matt, check my blog if you want to read the long version of this.
The beauty in all of this is that each of us thinks we can do a better job picking a good website than the google algo can. Google has as its roots using links as a/the major way of determining the quality of a site. But what is the truth? How easy is it to manipulate that? What other options are there. More on my blog. If you put a link here to my site, I will send you one of the below,
A) ten bucks,
B) a ford festiva,
C) thank you card,
D) catnip.
E) a link
F) karma
Question: Which of the above would be considered payment for a link?
Claus Lampert Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 1:13 am
I want to report a site: http://www.google.com:
- They receive A LOT of money to display ads in front of all other found sites in their search engine even if the paying site itself isn´t relevant. Spent enough money: 1st place in the search engine!!! No SEO neccessary!
- Google “spam” nearly each and every site on the internet displaying paid text links (they call adwords).
OK, what´s wrong with paid links? In my opinion: NOTHING. In “real life” companies pay much money to advertise on tv, radio, newspapers and so on. That´s ok. Now: how many tv- or radio stations will survive without paid ads? That´s what YOU think about!!!
Without google adsense, amazon and paid links I can close my site! That´s what google want´s? DO NO EVIL!
Harith Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 1:28 am
Dr. David Klein
Read your said article on your blog. Very interesting indeed. However when it comes to selling links for the purpose of boosting PageRank of the buyers sites, its mostly done for more than ten bucks or a catnip
We are talking about say around $800 a month for buying a backlink from a ite of PR9 and a round $2.000 per a month for a site of PR10. No thank you card and no karma as you see
In real life those PR-Backlinks sellers are a big problem not only for GOOG, but for decent SEOs. When a site owner see his compititor achieving higher PR value by buying a PR-Backlink from for example a site of PR10, that site owner will for sure press hardly his own SEO to do the same, though the SEO is a white Hat decent person.
In fact what Matt is doing is helping those SEOs to continue on the Whaite Hat path.
From now on a SEO can refer to Matt’s current post(s) to show that its a risky business, if the site(s) owner is pressing to purchase PR-Backlinks for the only purpose of boosting PR.
Michael Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 1:44 am
That’s nice idea. We’ll soon see the followers of Pavlik Morozov (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlik_Morozov) reporting his relatives to NKVD for the sake of Communism ideas, ops, sorry - reporting to Google for the sake of Page Rank purity!
x Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 1:58 am
What happens when webmasters can no longer buy relevant links? They will spam for them.
Don’t open that can of worms.
Harith Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 2:23 am
Claus Lampert
“OK, what´s wrong with paid links? In my opinion: NOTHING.”
Agreed! provided the paid links are for the purpose of advertising, generating traffic, branding, web promotion etc..
In that case there should be no problem at all, neither to to sellers or buyers, in adding a rel=nofollow to the paid links.
But its wrong if a site offer/buy paid links for the purpose of boosting PR value. I.e manipulate PageRank aiming to achieve better ranking on the organic listings on Google serps.
As to AdWords and AdSense, they have no whatsover influence on the advertising site’s ranking on the organic listings of Google serps or the PR value of the said site.
Christian Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 2:34 am
And don’t forget: ebay is never spam!
Martin Avis Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 2:51 am
If this really is all about Google trying to stop people manipulating their site’s PR by buying paid links on higher PR pages, and if PR has no other particular value to us as webmasters, then surely a far simpler solution would be for Google to stop displaying PR in the first place.
Claus Lampert Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 3:30 am
@Harith Said: I have only about 10.000 Visitors a month (Niche-Site with, as I think, interesting and actual content, Pagerank is 5). Paid Links double my revenue compared to adsense and amazon earnings. And that´s not much, trust me
Do You really think that someone will pay me a single buck for a “rel=nofollow link”? Do You really think that someone shares a link with me for the sake of visitors?
Selling links for the sake of giving PR to other site is ONE possibility to maintain a website (concerning “income”).
Simon Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 3:31 am
Down this road madness lies….
On the other hand, I did look at the custom t-shirt business (very briefly), and can assure Matt that the top two or three results in Google were dominated by paid links, and other interesting techniques at the time. I suspect the same is true of most big product categories.
Some of the paid links were text almost(?) randomly place in peoples blog pages.
T-Shirt hell also has an affiliate scheme, which is totally different, but also offers recompense for links, be it less directly. Does that count?
These days the T-Shirt hell links, seem to be dominated by advertising links from a company called “blogspot.com” (suggest you block em from the Index and see what happens ;-). Also noticed a load of links from totallyfree, which don’t seem to appear in the content served to my browser.
Despite all this, my automatic T-Shirt idea generator, with few links, mostly “no-follow” links, made it to page two in Google for “idea t-shirt”, with little effort on my part.
I’ll know Google has cracked something when Googling “click here”, tells you something about Web Page design, instead of the Adobe, Quicktime, Realplayer and Java downloads. That should have gone with the Google bombing code surely?! Except no doubt they had “click here” on the linked page somewhere.
But I think the paid link thing is madness. For starters the smart folk already did a lot of different text in the links, as that allows you to cover a lot of key words. And payment for a link is such a vague concept, I found a paid review linking to a T-shirt site, is that a paid link? Clearly it wouldn’t exist but for the money, but I think paying someone to review your site is a reasonable transaction, and a review without a link is pretty pointless.
I know my chess club took a paid link from a chess equipment supplier, that along with other such links distorted their Google rankings, but if they contributed as much to the other clubs as they did to ours, I think they deserve a good ranking, as it will encourage competitor to be as generous. I don’t think you meant this to put up the price of chess club memberships, but perhaps I’m wrong on that.
The Webmaster Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 4:13 am
Okay..
Let me figure this out.
Google wants us to create an awesome quality site and then wait for 10 years to get..ahem.. quality backlinks and visitors. Because According to google, we should not exchange links and we should not buy link ads either.
So now is there anyone going to tell me how are supposed to advertise our sites??
Yes answer is not difficult one.. there is Adwords always, isnt there.
And what if I go and buy my Competitor a handful of paid links or some of the spammy sites of the first degree and then report those links to google?
sq- Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 4:14 am
then please do not sell PAID LINKS on YOUR results pages. This is a free market - anyone can sell whatever they want. You’re starting to be funny. Hope that this will end soon.
sq- Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 4:18 am
I do not to be understood badly.
I’m not buying or selling links personally, but I think that for instance Yahoo or Adwhatever are selling links - clickable, visible links, and this is not spamming technique but Ad technique. I am of course against hidden/small links.
A2 Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 4:31 am
@Matt Cutts:
What do you think about Link-Vault and other automated link exchange programs? Is it spam? The links aren’t only for search engines, but also for users.
Ivan Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 4:43 am
My concern is, how on earth can Google determine whether a link is paid or not paid for? If it is exploring new technologies, then they surely must be working this into the algorithm now.
But what if lets say you never sell links but for some reason the algorithm determines that your site is providing them. How do you prove otherwise? And it allows too many opportunities for the competition to try and knock you out with penalties.I don’t see how this can be fair. The way that Google has made it’s algorithm (i.e. made the rankings a popularity contest) has been conducive to the situation we have today and penalising paid links is not the answer.
JohnMu Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 4:45 am
How can we tell if a site is relying on paid links as the vital element of their SEO strategy? It’s no use reporting paid links if they’re not doing anything useful :-).
Do you have any location to send mass reports to? If anyone is reporting these things, they’ll soon have 1000’s of sites to report…
Neale Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 5:04 am
Seems to me like if person A can report person B for selling/buying links this is opening a can of worms thats going to entail a whole bunch of work monitoring as their will be a whole bunch of people reporting sites for the wrong reasons.
Neeraj Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 5:41 am
I will give you a simple solution Matt…but you won’t like it.
Just don’t disclose pagerank and most link buying /selling done for manipulating search engines will stop.
Joeychgo Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 5:46 am
Has google ever considered that perhaps telling webmasters what kinds of links are good, bad and netural?
Also, I can tell you that im not a nofollow supporter. Why? Because it hasnt stopped anything. True spammers are still spamming like they always did. All Google accomplished was to greate a little more work for me.
Kyle Healey Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 6:00 am
I have to wonder what will stop companies in competitive industries from :
a) reporting false paid links
b) buying blatantly paid links against competitors
avecfrites Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 6:19 am
Let’s not read more into this than there is. I’m eager to have paid links reported. Many of my competitors have been beating me on some terms for years using paid links. These are links that are easy to see are fishy when looked at by a human, but perhaps not so obvious to an algorithm. They are typically at the bottom of or off to the side of the page, and without surrounding text that ties them to the page on which they are on. But they are not labeled “sponsored” and don’t have “nofollow” tags. And there are lots of these, and they pollute the SERPs. So if these sorts of links aren’t filtered out, should I start buying these too? Or just be content to be at a disadvantage?
Of course these sorts of links should be filtered out; the site to which they link shouldn’t be punished, though, because that would allow competitors to buy links to sites they don’t own just to report them.
Harith Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 6:28 am
I guess it will be of great benefit for further discussion , to recall a previous relevant post of Matt:
Text links and PageRank
John Rang Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 6:37 am
With this move–i can see the end of Google as the dominant SE in 2/3 years time as it will create havoc and confusion among webmasters and internet surfers in general.
While I do not support SPAM, lots of people will loose interest in creating high quality websites of free information to surfers as getting natural links are not a matter of joke.
Google must understand –it thrives for two things– Content based Search Results and PR.
Can you answer Matt– how I’ll provide high quality informations to the internet community by spending hrs of my time developing it and earning $100/month from Adsense? Thats not on. I must earn some more revenue by selling links –that is what every webmaster looks for -aspire for. Isn’t?
Google is getting outrageous/ too overconfidence –complacent with this policy and mark my words –soon there will be some-one to seize the oppotunity if you leave this ground.
Analyze your policy –why Google is the most favored SE now? If you know this answer you will not dare to implemet this policy.
Pedro Sttau Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 6:51 am
Inbound links are uncontrollable, therefore, the only thing Google can do is prevent site that are selling links from passing PR.
What prevents me from making myself pass on as a Markeeter of site X, buying links all over the place in the most obvious manner, and then simply report myself to Google? The motivation for doing something like this is rather blatant.
In conclusion, Google is going after the site’s that are selling the links, neutralizing them by making it impossible for them to pass PR and link weight.
Dave Dugdale Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 7:10 am
Matt, thanks for a way to report link buying - it is not a practice I do but my competitors do a lot.
My competitors have a ton of money to buy links which I don’t have so it is nice to see Google trying to level the playing field for the small guy like me.
Thanks!
Alex Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 7:22 am
@Dave: I think is quite the opposite, buying links could be a method for you to get your site noticed and a lot cheaper than AdWords.
Multi-Worded Adam Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 7:33 am
Kevin Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 7:50 am
when i first read matts post i reacted like most people did.
google obviously want their results to be relevant for users etc and as much as we all buy and sell links for seo purposes, the fact remains we did this because google put so much emphasis on them.
the search engines set the rules and webmasters do everything they can to promote their site within those rules and every few years it seems that the search engines change the rules to keep everyone on their toes.
whilst i understand googles position, i also hope think they appreciate how much this kind of advertising revenue is part of the industry now. there is a high % of websites and blogs that just wouldnt make any money because they arent directly selling a product.
the internet still lacks regulation which is why we’re seeing the major search engine on the web also being the biggest advertising network on the web.
i think that its something they will find hard to control. whats stopping any webmaster putting ‘friends sites’ lists on their site and just removing any reference to advertising from their site so that all info is sent via email.
i agree with claus in this comment : http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-to-report-paid-links/#comment-101593
why would anyone want to use javascript based advertising company like adbrite or google adsense if they can get the same traffic benefits from a regular link and have the seo benefits as well
Earl Grey Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 8:38 am
Maybe google should have done this one silently.
Too much of sweeping thing to do and businesses and incomes will be destroyed for you killing something that was happening even before google.
Although its fun to see all the panicing white hats who have been buying links for years without realising.
There is going to be fun on the forums with scared people
Harith Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 8:40 am
After reading the 118 comments on this post and the previous one (Hidden links) I’m surprised to see so many friends defending Sell/buy backlinks. It seems we are dealing with a whole Paid Backlinks Industry.
But as in most things in life; you can’t have both way. Soooooo…. Add rel=nofollow to those fancy paid backlinks of yours ..or else
To all of you happy Paid Backlinks fans, few words of comfort from Matt:
“What if a site wants to buy links purely for visitor click traffic, to build buzz, or to support another site? In that situation, I would use the rel=”nofollow” attribute. The nofollow tag allows a site to add a link that abstains from being an editorial vote. Using nofollow is a safe way to buy links, because it’s a machine-readable way to specify that a link doesn’t have to be counted as a vote by a search engine.”
Multi-Worded Adam Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 9:24 am
Don’t you mean panicking black hats? Just wondering.
Amateur Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 9:34 am
I found your post here via an unpaid link.
I don’t pay anyone for links, but I do trade links to sites related to my own. And I remove links for sites that don’t reciprocate.
My paterank is 4, so I must not be paying enough attention to what’s going on with Google.
I’m spending more time on adding content that’s relevant to my visitors than I am to anything else.
But it just seems very hypocritical of Google to want to be made aware of who is paying for links, when your own business model is based on this very thing. The more links you sell, the more your shares sell for, the more revenue the shareholders paid.
But, others are not supposed to follow your example.
Do as I say, not as I do. Is that the message here?
Halfdeck Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 9:45 am
For all the people posting here that think paid links are not spam, read
http://www.cre8asiteforums.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=48187
“A New Age Of Seo - Link Buying Taken To The Extreme, Who says you can’t buy the Google #1 spot?”
Yeah, it only takes money and a span of 2 weeks to buy your way into #1 for “car insurance.”
Michele Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 9:49 am
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?
David Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 10:09 am
ok - I admit that I didn’t read every comment here, just most of them, but I didn’t see a comment or question about sites like http://www.prweb.com. Look at these press releases and I bet you find that 60% or better were placed, at least in part, for the purpose of getting links.
So once you have your data Matt, just how do you propose dealing with such situations? We all know that whatever you do on this one you’re going to pull some of the weeds, but not all of them - and others will grow in the cracks.
Claus Lampert Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 10:16 am
@Halfdeck: “Yeah, it only takes money and a span of 2 weeks to buy your way into #1 for car insurance.”
With enough money you can do that IMMEDIATELY via adwords. With a different background-color and surely in front of all other search-results!
What´s the difference? Buying and selling LINKS is “evil”, “adwords” [tm] and “adsense” [tm] is not???
Kris Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 10:19 am
Thi is my first spam report about paidlink. The adress of website where allways selling many links is http://adwords.google.com
Steve Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 11:03 am
I don’t see where this is going to help.
Site ” A ” buying links ( with a large marketing budget ) is going to approach other websites offering to pay for a one way link.
Site ” B ” selling the link will never display on there site they sold a link.
So problem will still exist. Big budget guys will over run the algo. Small guys will be nailed again.
Honestly I think the whole backlink thing is one of the worst factors in SEO since it is so easy to manipulate it. ” blog spamming, auto forum posting software, guestbook spamming ” etc.
mobrik Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 11:11 am
All links are paid links. Period.
The web is a market which is driven by that invisible hand where each webmaster/publisher/blogger takes care of her/his own interests. That is, you place a link on a page because you either get something for it or intend to get something (money, return link, fame, fortune, whatever).
This is a natural behavior. Live with it, or rather build an algorithms that lives with it and still provides value.
Matt Cutts Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 11:25 am
Happy to help, Jayson Joseph. At least there’s a way to provide feedback now.
Dave (Original), it would be nice to update our html documentation and add more examples, plus concise one-page guides that people could check out. One issue might be getting good translations of that info into lots of languages, but in general I’d be a fan of that idea.
LaCabra, I responded to you on the other post, but I dropped you an email to get some more info about the same content on different urls. Sometimes that happens by accident (e.g. the Chicago graduate school of business had the same content that could be reached at two different urls), but I’d be happy to ask someone to check it out.
Everett, we definitely agree on the “we all know that you want a site ranked on its merit” part. But I do think that different approaches to paid links can be realistic.
Dr. David Klein, this is a response to requests that I got at SES London about an easier way to tell Google about paid links. I’d be most interested in the “I’ll pay $X for a link that affects search engines” type of stuff right now, whether it be via a link that passes PageRank or a paid post/article that isn’t disclosed as paid. That’s the data that would be most useful right now.
Claus Lampert/sq-/Amateur/Kris, I appreciate your suggestion, but Google uses robots.txt to exclude our search results and ad redirects, so neither of those links passes PageRank or affects other search engines (unless they ignore robots.txt).
Harith, part of this post is to let people know in advance that Google is looking at some new ways to approach paid links that affect search engines, so it’s true that this post serves as a place to point people to. Google wants to hear about paid links that pass PageRank or potentially affect search engines in the same way that we want to hear about things like hidden text or keyword stuffing.
Michael, if you’d prefer not to use the spam report form that’s of course your choice, but I wanted to provide a mechanism for the people that are interested.
Martin Avis and Neeraj, I’ll pass that suggestion on, but lots of people who aren’t webmasters enjoy seeing the PageRank bar, so I wouldn’t expect that to change.
Simon, it’s cool that your site started to rank for custom T-shirt stuff. I would be interested to hear more details about the paid links you saw.
The Webmaster, there are lots of creative ways to let people know about a site other than paid links, from providing useful information to a new idea on a service. techmeme.com was registered less than a year ago, but think about how quickly it has become daily reading. Aaron Swartz use to run the #1 ranked site for [google blog], then he decided to go off and make this little site called reddit.com. Of course not every site is going to be a reddit.com or a techmeme.com, but there are lots of sites that do well by finding a creative angle or hook.
Ivan, there are lots of creative ways you could approach the issue (there was a fun comment in Scoble’s thread, for example).
JohnMu, the authenticated spam report form is the best place. Next best is the unauthenticated spam report form. We’ll look at better mechanisms down the road, but I wanted to provide a way to do it now.
Joeychgo, Google’s algorithms and scoring relevancy definitely benefit from the additional data that disclosure provides.
avecfrites, well said.
Glad you mentioned that post, Harith. I’ve been saying this for a long time:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/text-links-and-pagerank/
The only new information from 2005 is that there’s a way to directly communicate about this, and people have some advance notice that Google will be looking at some new approaches on paid links.
John Rang, I think Google does well and is able to provide relevant search results right now partially because we continually focus on search quality and webspam. Or at least I hope it’s not all just the holiday logos.
I think competition in search is a good thing (whether it be a start-up or Microsoft/Yahoo) because it keeps every engine focused on delivering quality search results in the best way that we know how.
“My competitors have a ton of money to buy links which I don’t have so it is nice to see Google trying to level the playing field for the small guy like me.” Happy to try to help, Dave Dugdale.
Michele, I do think that disclosure of paid links is important, and I do think many people would agree (see Dave Dugdale’s comment or avecfrites’ comment, for example).
Robert Wetzlmayr Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 11:38 am
The logical next step: Weed out those “Get two back links for one article submission” sites. Mostly irrelevant content, targeted link texts, passing PR is the only reason theses sites exist.
eddytom Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 11:45 am
Say I buy a text link which displays my keywords, which is what I am ‘advertising’ and it is featured in the left column menu in a list of 20 other external text links. Is that a bought text link that could penalize me? I have in many circumstances bought such a text link and never received any hits from it, then that site (months later) reaches the top of the search engines and starts to get a lot of hits, as a result it gets me a few hits, therefore it was worth the money I paid for it. Is this site, and my site, going to be penalized as spam for this?
I am in an industry where one hit could mean thousands of dollars and I don’t think I should be penalized if I want to buy 150 paid text links on different sites that never gets me any hits. The potential of a hit here and a hit there is worth it for me to buy those ‘paid text links’, but I don’t think it should hurt my own site’s SEO.
Hagrin Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 12:30 pm
I would classify this as one of those “good, but half-baked ideas” that will probably/should probably be discussed come those Monday morning chit chats at the ping pong table or over Wii Tennis.
Matt Cutts Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 12:43 pm
Robert Wetzlmayr, I’ll take that feedback under advisement. I’m always open to feedback on what Google to do to improve results quality.
eddytom, it sounds like you’re most interested in the actual visitors; something like a link that goes through an internal redirect that is robot’ed out would let you get all the visitors without worrying about search engines.
Hagrin, using the spam report form and giving a keyword to report specific issues has been a pretty good way to let people give us feedback. Keywords like “gilligan” and many others have been used in the past.
Londoner Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 12:45 pm
See, it’s pretty simple. Google don’t do evil.
So if you are a competitor, trying to sell links, you are taking away Google’s potential revenue, cos if you didn’t sell links directly, they’d put AdWords on your site and sell links that way.
But if you put links on your own, and you keep the money for yourself, that’s just plain selfish.
So Google will punish you and the people who buy from you.
This isn’t evil Google stifling the competition. It’s just them playing the right hand of God, so don’t go bitching all you “shady SEO”s!!!!
JasonK Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 12:50 pm
If we have to login with our account to report the paid links does that mean you’ll penalize the the sites of the owners who submit false claims?
To me it just seems that many web site owners are going to get penalized and not even know why.
I think the sites you get on this first page that are just full of google adsense and other links need to go first.
Harvey Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 1:22 pm
To be honest Matt, this is kinda a big subject for a lot of people.
I find it somewhat funny that this post is relatively short and nondescript. On top of that, it’s buried behind 3 other posts on the same day - a review of spicy food, some funny pictures and a short clickbot post. One might be forgiven for not catching this post first time round.
I think if there is going to be a witch hunt on paid links, then you / Google needs to give us more information.
For example…
Google needs to clarify in much much more detail what a paid link is. Are you just talking about Text-Link-Ads, or are we talking about every paid link which is not nofollowed?
What does that mean for paid directories such as Yahoo directory? I really hope that Google isn’t saying it’s ok for them to sell links but not for the rest of us.
What does this mean for links traded for a box of beer or some other non-cash goods or services?
What does this mean for Wordpress template footer links? Surely this is an example of link bait - provide a free template in exchange for links - surely that’s ok right?
What does this mean for paid reviews where the post is clearly marked as paid, but it includes a natural link. In the grand scheme of things, surely a post about company X is a natural place to expect a natural link?
What about web designers placing a “Web design by …” link on their client’s sites? The client has paid for the site, and included in that package is a link.
And then…
What happens when a website is reported - pray do tell us?
-Does the whole site get deindexed by Google?
-Is the ability to pass PR stripped from the whole site?
-Or is the ability to pass PR stripped from that page?
-Or is the ability to pass PR stripped from those paid links only?
-Do you tell site owner when said penalty is applied?
-Once the paid link is removed or nofollowed, is the penalty removed 100%?
-Some website owners have contracts in place for links, and can’t legally change the links for several months. Is there a grace period?
Matt / Google - please, please give us more information. This is a serious change to how a lot of site owners do business, and I find the lack of specifics somewhat insulting actually.
Blog Owner Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 1:37 pm
Matt,
It’s a bit coincidental that my blog was de-indexed straight after this reporting thing was created by your team. I won’t mention the url here. However, you can see the url through the email address I used to make this comment.
Is it de-indexing that will happen to those who have been reported? Or is it something else that may have caused my blog to be de-indexed.
I was getting a nice amount of natural traffic from Google search until this happened.
If you could provide an answer through here or privately through email, I would appreciate your honesty and comments.
Thanks,
Matt Cutts Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 2:00 pm
Harvey, Google is going to try out some new approaches to paid links; that’s why we wanted to collect reports to get feedback and see how well some of these techniques work. I’m most interested in the “I’ll pay you $X for a link that affects search engines” reports for now, whether that happens via a direct link or paid posts/articles. I discussed the idea of WordPress sponsored themes in the post before this one, but I’d read Matt Mullenweg’s post for his perspective as well.
I’ve talked about our current practices for a while now; here’s a post from 2005 with more background: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/text-links-and-pagerank/
Google (and I’m sure most search engines) have algorithms that assess the trust to put in individual links, individual pages, and entire sites. The data that we get from people that want to give us feedback will help us assess several new things that we’re looking at (both algorithms and tools). I’d also like us to look at additional ways to communicate about paid links down the road, but right now I’m more interested in getting some additional data to compare against the internal data that we already compute.
Vincent Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 2:17 pm
I read a this post and the comments with great interest and several thoughts come to mind. Firstly, is this not going to start a wave of webmasters title-tattling on each other and worse still turning on each other? Somehow, this does not sit well, in the past I have seen many ideas come out of here some of them bordering the fantastic and others more mediocre. This idea of telling tales on each other is not one of the better ones, in actual fact all I can see it doing is causing friction amongst webmasters.
Secondly, why is Google asking others to do its job, isn’t this something that the Google algorithm should be figuring out without having others resort to reporting their competitors and other websites unrelated to them?
Yes, we all want our sites to rank high, it’s given, our businesses depend on it. To this end some of us are working damn hard to produce unique and compelling content that will be naturally linked. But, it is appearing more and more that no matter how much you play by the rules or try and keep it reasonably in the guidelines that the goalpost moves again and again . This time it could come at a high price.
I am wondering how far this is going to go, will it affect link-buyers who buy just a few links or purchase them in the hundreds, will this turn into a kind of purge on a mass-scale or will each report be independently judged on its merit and the ‘offending site’ in question be thoroughly investigated by manually before action is taken or will it become an automatic decision based on a scant glance beca8use of the large amounts of reports coming in?
scott fish Said,
April 15, 2007 @ 2:27 pm
hey matt- would you mind addressing some of the things that I mentioned in my previous comment on this post?
http://w