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 posts and show why the major search engines don’t want to be affected by links within paid posts. The problem is best illustrated by a serious example: suppose you just visited your doctor and got a scary surprise: you or a member of your family have a tumor. The doctor is throwing around words like steroids, surgery, chemo, and radiosurgery. Much of what the doctor says washes over you, but you remember the word “radiosurgery” and resolve to find out more when you get home.
At home, you fire up a search engine and type “radiosurgery.” If you go to Google and search for [radiosurgery], the results give a pretty good overview of what radiosurgery is (focused radiation that targets tumors). In the first several results, you have balanced information from the International RadioSurgery Association, an overview page on Wikipedia, a great background page from RadiologyInfo, even an introductory-level essay on radiosurgery from the Mayo Clinic. If you came back from the doctor and wanted to get an overview of radiosurgery, I hope you’d find the results useful.
Now, think about how you would feel if your medical search was influenced by pages like this:
The posts themselves don’t mention it, but entries like these often turn out to be what are known as “paid posts.” That is, someone paid money in order to receive a review, and the paid review includes a link with the word “radiosurgery,” for example. There’s no disclosure inside these entries whether these posts are paid, nor do the posts use the nofollow attribute or some other mechanism so that search engines aren’t affected.
Now I’m going to ask you to put on your regular user hat. If you’ve just learned that you or a family member have a tumor, would you prefer that radiosurgery overview article from the Mayo Clinic, or from a site which appears to be promoting a specific manufacturer of medical equipment via paid posts? My guess is that you’d prefer the Mayo Clinic.
In the example above, notice that the post says “I myself had never heard of this treatment process until now.” On a subject as serious as brain tumors, it’s troubling if someone is getting paid to review and link to a site, especially if it appears that they weren’t aware of this treatment until they were paid to write about the subject. In researching this incident, we saw lots of people doing paid posts about brain tumors who admitted that they weren’t familiar with the subject beforehand. Sometimes posts were even more inaccurate:
“Is there any new medical breakthrough in the treatment of brain tumore [sic]?” If the paid poster had researched their subject more, they would have discovered that this particular treatment has been around for two decades. In fact, the promoted site mentions that one of the main reasons to use their technique is because it’s well-established, not brand-new. If someone doesn’t do enough research for a paid post to know that a treatment is well-established instead of brand-new, how can you trust their opinion about brain tumors? Here’s another post that claims this treatment technique is new:
“happy and proud to introduce the GAMMA KNIFE”? Again, this is not a new treatment technique. In fact, anyone who read the first page on the promoted site would have realized that one of the selling points of the device is that the technology is well-established. But there are more noticeable mistakes than calling the technique new when it’s actually been around for decades. Sometimes the posts don’t even get the name of the treatment right:
Notice that this post consistently refers to the “Lesksell Gamma Knife” treatment. The correct name is Leksell. I also saw one person call it the “Gama Knife” treatment, and someone else called it the “Gamma Knive” treatment. If you’re getting paid to write a review, shouldn’t you at least perform the basic research to get the product name right?
I have a lot more snapshots I could show, but I hope these examples help explain my point. For this very important (potentially even life-or-death) medical topic, we saw paid reviewers admit that they knew nothing about a treatment before getting paid to post about it, or who didn’t research the subject enough to know that a treatment was decades old instead of brand-new. We saw people writing about brain tumors who didn’t even spell “tumor” correctly, and we saw people who got the name of the sponsor wrong.
If you put your user hat back on, I hope you’ll agree that you wouldn’t want a serious medical search for brain tumor treatments to be affected by inaccurate or uninformed posts. In fact, if you stumbled across these entries on the web, you might not know whether someone got paid for writing these posts. In the same way that a regular surfer would want disclosure to know if a post were paid, all the major search engines also want to make sure that paid posts are adequately disclosed to search engines as well. Google’s documentation for webmasters gives examples of how to do that. I believe the vast majority of our users don’t want our organic search results for something as serious as brain tumors to be affected by links in paid posts.
I hope these examples help to explain the motivation for our quality guidelines, and how those guidelines ensure a better experience for users. To read more about this subject, you can start at Google’s quality guidelines. Where you see the guideline “Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank” you can click on “participate in link schemes” to get more guidance. That page specifically mentions “Buying or selling links that pass PageRank” as being against our quality guidelines, and it’s also clickable so that you can read more about buying or selling links in our HTML documentation.
(Just as a side-note: I don’t normally send my blog posts to Google’s public relations or legal folks before posting. For this entry, I did get this post approved by Google’s PR/legal department first to make sure that what I said was an accurate reflection of Google’s opinion on this subject. If you’re concerned because this is a post on my personal blog, we also did an official blog post about this issue today.)
Matt Cutts Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 3:34 pm
By the way, at SES San Jose I got feedback about “buy PageRank”-type ads in AdWords. I recently chatted with AdWords policy folks, and the AdWords folks have disabled ads for many queries such as “pagerank 8″ that would have shown ads before. I expect that we’ll probably disable ads for more “buy PageRank”-type queries as well.
Thanks to the people who provided that feedback at SES San Jose, and I’m looking forward to chatting with people more at the PubCon search conference next week as well.
Shawn Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 3:49 pm
This seems like a very specific example, I hope all is well with you and your family Matt.
Matt Cutts Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 4:06 pm
Shawn, I did want to go through a specific example to ground the debate a little bit. My wife was out of town this week, so I got a little more time for blogging and to comment around the web. She’s back now though, so that will limit my blogging time a little bit.
I am looking forward to talking to people at PubCon though. It’s a good chance to chat with folks and get good feedback, so I’m pretty excited about heading to Vegas next week.
Ray Burn Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 4:35 pm
This is post is a master class - if you need to hammer home why a practice is bad - use a powerful example to illustrate it.
Thanks for this Matt.
Hopefully, those engaged in such practices might now “get it” - and hopefully hang their heads in shame at the same time.
When I say “hopefully” I am being optimistic, but there was no better way that Matt could put this point across…
Matt Cutts Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 4:37 pm
Ray Burn, my hope was that a real-world example would help make the point. I’m glad you agree.
Oliver Taco Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 4:39 pm
I think it is very useful to have a non-trivial example like this to get people away from the debate about “Amazon’s copy of 7 Habits versus one from B&N.”
So I think we can all agree that here this would be a bad place to have to wade through pages of *stuff*.
But, the *general* reason Google wants people to hit ‘the best possible page’ is so that they can make more money in the long run. (Not complaining, just saying.) The reason that the paid link manipulators want to control the movement is to make more money.
Unfortunately for the link manipulators, they’re playing inside the Matrix so they are usually at cross purposes to Google.
Which doesn’t mean that, in all cases, either of you are right, of course.
-OT
graywolf Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 4:41 pm
Wow it’s a good thing google doesn’t use KW rich outlinks with people they are in financial arrangements with, because reading this post someone could certainly get the wrong idea
http://googlecheckout.blogspot.com/2007/07/golfballscom-scores-with-google-product.html
While links like “Titleist Pro V1 Golf Balls” may not be as life safety related the principal is clearly the same
Dave Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 4:41 pm
If Google can’t filter out pages that are achieving their rankings through such tactics and it’s concerned people reading those pages will get bad info, then why is Google not warning it’s users?
Maybe put something like this at the top of the serps “Warning: Google’s index can be manipulated. Don’t blindly trust site’s with high ranking. Use discretion.”
Then the note at the top of the serps can be removed once Google can spot paid links not using nofollow. Because I doubt that everyone will adopt the nofollow tag for such links and that means it’s up to Google’s algo to spot them.
Matt Cutts Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 4:54 pm
graywolf, I appreciate your efforts to find some way to accuse Google of bad behavior, but that was a normal editorial blog post. I double-checked and the Google Checkout team linked with what they thought was accurate text, and no money was involved. They even offered to remove the anchortext if it would help.
By the way, we also put redirects in place on that Enterprise search appliance testimonial page, just to remove even the chance that someone could claim Google was acting improperly in that instance as well.
Maybe instead of looking for an anti-Google angle on this one, you could discuss whether doing paid posts about brain tumors is or isn’t the best thing for the web? If you were doing this search, would you want search engines to be affected by posts like the ones I showed?
Matt Cutts Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 5:04 pm
“But, the *general* reason Google wants people to hit ‘the best possible page’ is so that they can make more money in the long run.”
Oliver Taco, I think this is an interesting point. I think Google has done a relatively good job of aligning our users interests with Google’s interests, so that doing what is good for users or people on the web in general is also good for Google.
I can say that for me personally, I’ve pressed for a lot of things that would decrease revenue to Google, at least short-term, because it would make our users happier. I pushed pretty hard years ago for a blanket stance against Google doing pop-up ads, for example. I’ve also pressed to reduce low-quality publishers in AdSense, too. Either one of those choices might mean less revenue short-term, but happier users and advertisers are likely to be more loyal in the future. Google has taken stronger stances recently e.g. to kick spammy sites out of AdSense, and I think that is better long-term for users and Google.
So for me personally, I’m glad that Google is taking this position because I genuinely think it’s the right one for the web and regular users. You’re welcome to believe me or not, but the ability to make a difference is one of the reasons that I still love working at Google.
niels | zeineku.de Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 5:04 pm
by the way, Google Adsense has at least one customer from the Gamma Knife business. When I search for “Leksell Gamma Knife”, a Google ad from “InternationalGammaKnifeClinic.com” referring to a website titled “Surviving Brain Tumors” is shown…
zoran Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 5:07 pm
OK, Matt it is not 1999 or 2003. Machines are “smarter” and can dedicate more CPU for semantical analyze… as you do already. For many users who use “wordpress” or some other platform and have WYSWYG do not even know how to go into code and rel=”nofollow”
Also it would be even more useful for both users and search engines if they would be treated the same way. What about simple human readable syntax that starts like this:
Ad: This is (sponsored|paid) (review|article|post).
Here post what ever content is paid.
End of ad.
This is much better way to think about both users and search engines and treat those links among Ad:.*end of ad.” absolutely like nofollow.
nofollow is ok for non-moderated comments etc. or paied links that users put in template (who knows to edit template source knows to add nofollow).
OK that is my feedback have good SPAM fight and thanks for posting my screenshots
graywolf Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 5:10 pm
>no money was involved
You don’t think being mentioned on the Google Product blog will drive traffic to that website which will result in sales? Since they are using Google checkout Google gets a % of sale somewhere down the line.
if you do a search for [brain tumors] the first he result is an unlocked wikipedia listing
http://www.google.com/search?q=brain+tumors
Since anyone, medically competent or not, sitting in front of a computer could edit that page I’d be more concerned about providing results with questionable accuracy more than anything else
This just illustrates what I’ve been saying all along, other than the two parties involved, no one has any idea what the motivation was for the link.
Matt Cutts Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 5:12 pm
…and my wife just walked in the door. I’m going to be hanging with her tonight, but I’ll try to stop by this thread as well over the weekend. I’ll also enjoy talking about this subject more at PubCon with folks.
Dave (original) Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 5:19 pm
Great example Matt, it certainly hits home with me! My wife uses Google daily to find information on my 5 year ongoing undiagnosed neurology problems. My Neurologist has even warned us about the miss-information out there on the Web.
Searcher beware!
graywolf Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 5:21 pm
oh and if you don’t think wikipedia medical pages have inaccuracies look at the rubella page, especially discussion and history
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubella
The page claim rubella was eliminated/eradicated from the US which is incorrect a prominent US podcaster Cali Lewis contracted it earlier this year, which resulted in the editing war on the wiki where truth lost out to people in petty turf wars
http://www.google.com/search?q=cali+lewis+rubella
sorry for the link drops, just trying to illustrate my point
Matt Cutts Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 5:29 pm
Dave (original), I know someone who has been coping with a possible tumor and what the best treatment is too. That’s what really made this example catch my attention.
graywolf, you’re welcome to view a Google Checkout blog post in a cynical way. I’m just telling you that I went and chatted with that team, and they didn’t see it that way themselves when they wrote that post.
Now when I do a search for brain tumors, I see medical information above even the Wikipedia page, e.g. ”
Treatment
Tests/diagnosis
For patients
From medical authorities
Symptoms
Causes/risk factors
For health professionals
Alternative medicine” and I think that information is pretty high-quality.
Regarding the Wikipedia page: yes, it’s true that anyone could edit that Wikipedia page, but in practice that’s a pretty helpful page for a regular user.
ken Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 5:30 pm
Ok, so now we have something official
I agree about paid posts, I have been spotting more of them recently, and started delisting some sites with the bad type from my directory, obviously its going to take a long, long while to check them all, and also some seem ok if they are clearly marked as paid posts etc.
However, I rely on a handful of paid links at the footer of very few pages on my site in order to pay for the hosting. As the site operates on a free basis, and does not generate any income from its users, it is the *only* way I can afford to keep the site running.
Non of the sites linked to are gambling sites, porn sites, brain tumour sites etc, they are all above board.I also check those links to ensure I vote for the sites, and if I dont agree, the link goes. I stopped running adbrite ads because they started publishing rubbish without my permission, but so far no footer links have been of the spammy variety, all sites I do not mind linking to. (to be honest, I find more objectionable adverts on the adsense ads I run on site!)
Does this mean, I now face two choices
1. Leave the links, but take a big hit from google
2. Remove the links and have to close the site when the hosting I have already paid for in advance runs out? Adsense would not cover the hosting costs, and I cant afford it myself….
3. Change the links, which may be in breach of the terms of the site that I got them through..
4. Start charging users for submission, and hope people pay, and also do a diservice as it would give those with money a unfair advantage, the whole point of my site is it is open for all - rich or poor to be able to submit their blog. I am very reluctant to change that, as I know what it is like to have very little money.
Also, when I started the site, googles main rule appeared to be design sites for the user, not the search engine. Having to change how you code or finance a site to suit a search engine seems to be changing that rule.
Are you going after all paid links, or just the people who are putting them into posts (which I dont do), and the people that are putting them into content, and have them all over the place where you cant tell what is real and what is paid?
Marc Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 5:36 pm
My aunt made a very expensive purchase via a recommendation from a blog.
She was severely disappointed with the products and lost a considerable amount money due to shipping charges and restocking fee. Add to that all the time she wasted.
It turned out the blogger does a lot of paid posts through a company called xxxxxxxxxx. Virtually all her reviews were paid posts.
Being an online veteran, it didn’t take long for me to realize all her product reviews were fake. She didn’t actually have any experience with the products she was reviewing nor did she even do much research on products. My aunt had no idea.
I hope Google’s relevance algorithm is doing something to those kinds of posts even if they do have nofollow tags.
[Marc, I pruned out the name of the company. Please try to avoid calling out specific companies in the comments.]
John Hunter Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 5:39 pm
*** I have a very long comment. Feel free (of course) to trim it and link to
I agree I wouldn’t give that post much weight. What if it were a pre-eminent brain tumor researcher that was posting while being paid by the Mayo Clinic (because they decided that was a good way to encourage publicizing content that would reach the public) and he suggested further reading at the Mayo Clinic. Then I would have no problem reading it and giving that content a high value and following his advice and reading more at the Mayo Clinic. The issue is the value of the content. Knowing the ways the author might be biased (who is paying them) is one valid thing to consider.
The idea for Pagerank came from the citation of academic papers. Google’s current position would be that citations from those papers that are funded by other than the author should be ignored. That is not how citation value is calculated in the academic world. An I do not believe it would be an improvement to do so, though I can believe there is a minority that believes exactly that.
…
And the same with ignoring the links recommended by lets say high authority sites that don’t exactly follow Google’s desires. Google could just choose to ignore the “votes” of those sites but if those “votes” are not of 0 value (lets say 100% corrupt) then Google would be throwing away valuable insight (by ignoring the votes of that site). Obviously that is Google’s choice but it seems to be pretty obvious that doing so is far from an ideal engineering solution. There is value (votes of an authority) being ignored. Too much ignoring of worthwhile information (even if that information is tainted by payment) and it provides an opening for competitors to make better use of that information to provide results. I just can’t see that as in Google’s interest.
Much more at:
http://curiouscatlinks.blogspot.com/2007/12/googles-search-results-should-factors.html
***
[John Hunter, I did prune your comment after the link to your post. No need to include most of your post here when people can click to read your post. Thanks, Matt.]
Patrick Altoft Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 5:39 pm
Matt, surely the blogs that are posting this rubbish (I believe that most paid posts are rubbish) don’t have enough authority to pass any PR anyway? Can’t Google just figure out which blogs are low quality and remove them from the index/stop them passing weight?
Scorpy01 Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 5:40 pm
Right. Except that Google targets only the little guy who can’t fight back. It’s okay for Arrington to pass link juice to his “sponsors” but not okay when I do it.
Karoli (who hasn’t done paid posts for many months) explains it well:
http://www.drumsnwhistles.com/2007/11/30/behold-the-spirit-of-scrooge/
Looks like Google is the new Microsoft. And I mean that in a really bad way.
Another Matt Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 5:45 pm
I am currently being penalized by Google for paid links. I see how something like TLA could be “bad.” However, I don’t see a problem with a site selling links that pass pagerank when the seller is an authority and checks out the other site / product.
I got rid of TLA, but I’ve kept my other ads. I have a long standing relationship with those advertisers and I stand behind their services. I think I am doing google and the rest of the web a service by KEEPING the links there.
Would I link to them without being paid? Yes, but in a different spot on the site — In return for money they get nice pictures that entice clicks.
I agree with you that mass buying of links promotes search spam. However, even advertisement links can be accompanied by trust. To analogize to the “real world,” you have celebrities who will endorse any old product, and you have those that will only endorse products that they believe in. In the long run, the ones that endorse quality products will develop a reputation for endorsing quality products. Why is this bad?
I totally agree with your perspective in this post. However, there needs to be some way to endorse sites. You’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
P.S. I think this whole pagerank penalty has been handled extremely poorly from a communications perspective. If you penalize someone for something, you should tell them 1) that it happened and 2) why it happened. Why don’t you use webmaster tools for this?
James Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 5:46 pm
Dave (original) are you related to Matt? Everything he posts seems to have something to do with you.
I think the site shown is fine, frankly I am genuinely surprised that it’s not showing adsense.
So what do you recommend Matt? what is the answer that you are pushing for with all these posts?
Every website sits and waits to build organic links? whilst it’s competitors are out there buying them and getting vast amounts of traffic (because you can’t get anywhere now-a-days without paying for exposure) - remember adsense?….
Why do you sell links to all those crap sites?????????????????????????
Kathy Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 5:48 pm
Matt, this is a great example and I appreciate the time and effort you took to clearly define the boundaries and set up the case for the seriousness of medical conditions. Its the same reason I work to keep my site up and available - to help during a scary medical time.
Any luck finding out what might be keeping my indexed pages at 13K? Does Google ever limit a website’s pages in search results - especially since you have indicated to me that I haven’t been penalized? I keep scratching my head trying to make sense of this in why I can’t get the google bot to index more pages. Any help you can provide would be much appreciated so I can continue to help women with scary medical conditions. Thanks bunches!
Oliver Taco Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 5:49 pm
Matt -
I applaud you for having long term vision - popups were probably as bad as PointCast (yes, I am old).. And I don’t think that making money is *bad* as long as the customers are satisfied.
I buy my clothes at Nordstoms because of the service not because of the price. But I buy my groceries at Sams because of the price. So I understand both sides of the debate.
I’m glad you guys are going after spectrum. I think you’ll be as good as being a regulated utility as SAS was at being a common carrier, but I think a lot of positives will come out of it.
I’m not anti-google, but I’m also old enough to look past both the fairy prince and savior-of-manking cartoon figures and see a savvy company making money.
-OT
Jonathan Street Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 5:53 pm
I definitely wouldn’t want those types of pages influencing search results. Not because they have been paid for but because they’re nonsense. Looking at the first example I wouldn’t expect a site posting about car loans, colon cleansing and sausage pizza to have any clue about brain surgery.
In that instance whether the link/post has been paid for in my opinion should be well down on the list of priorities for how much value the search engines should give to any links.
As a counterpoint perhaps you could comment on the following scenario. A site specialising in cancer and written by a medical researcher (we won’t go with a doctor because (s)he probably makes enough money not to need to take paid reviews) specialising in the field posts an article reviewing this site. (S)he treats it like any other article and spends considerable time researching the product and then posts their honest opinion. The only ‘problem’ though is that (s)he was paid to write the post. How should google treat the link?
I like this scenario better because unlike the sites posted above besides the paid link issue it probably should be expected to pass ‘linkjuice’.
Dito Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 5:55 pm
Matt,
What about paid directories like Yahoo! or any of the 1000’s of smaller ones? Would Google consider paid directories the same as selling links that pass pagerank?
Thanks,
Jim
Dave (original) Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 5:58 pm
Try reading with both eyes open, or even reading period.
John Hunter, from reading your post you appear to be suggesting that Google allow pages to buy their way up the organic SERPs?
graywolf Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 6:00 pm
Matt that’s exactly my point I can certainly have an opinion about why I think Google wrote that post and gave those links, but how true that opinion turns out to be, amounts to nothing more than a best guess …
One thing you happened to omit is the paid listing for Radiosurgery the first listing is a premium PPC slot. Why is it OK for that listing to pay to influence the SERP’s but it’s not OK for the person who paid for a text link advertisement you showed? The painfully obvious difference is that Google makes a profit in the “google approved” form of advertising and in the “google non approved” version they don’t.
John Faber Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 6:10 pm
Matt -
Thanks for this - mesothelioma cancer is even worse, 99% of the sites within this keyword are adword only sites or total spam, with adwords
J -
Matt Cutts Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 6:11 pm
“Matt, surely the blogs that are posting this rubbish (I believe that most paid posts are rubbish) don’t have enough authority to pass any PR anyway? Can’t Google just figure out which blogs are low quality and remove them from the index/stop them passing weight?”
Patrick Altoft, Google does reserve the right to take action to protect the quality of our index. In general, that can include removing the ability of a site to pass PageRank, decreasing the PageRank in the Google toolbar to show that we have less trust in the page/site, all the way up to demoting or removing pages or sites that are sufficiently spammy — for example, practically no one would want Google to keep those spammy .cn domains that host malware in our index. What I wanted to do was post on the official Google webmaster blog to state our policy in really clear terms, e.g. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/information-about-buying-and-selling.html and then to talk through an example in this post to give more background on why Google has the policy that we have.
Matt Cutts Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 6:12 pm
Dave (original), no need to be sarcastic. James, I don’t think we’re related. Lots of people have to deal with neurology and tumor-related issue. It’s amazingly stressful, and not to be taken lightly.
Grant Glendinning Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 6:17 pm
Graywolf - I wholeheartedly agree with you. I would feel uneasy at being presented with questionable content every time I searched in Google. The larger Wikipedia becomes the more search terms it is starting to cover and thus, the greater coverage the site gets. Unfortuantely Google doesn’t see it that way. The fact there is a *lot* of Wikipedia’s content duplicated on the net doesn’t make it seem very trustworthy either. But, at the end of the day, as you clearly pointed out - money talks.
Matt Cutts Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 6:17 pm
Kathy, it’s good to hear from you again. I emailed folks in Google about http://www.hystersisters.com/ and it’s generated some good discussion, but no definitive cause for having a small number of pages indexed right now. Your case has been bumping around in the back of my brain, and I’m thinking a couple things:
1. I might need to learn more about SEO for forums, or to ask someone at Google what things we could do to improve forum coverage.
2. Some more PageRank on your site wouldn’t hurt. I’ve been meaning to do a “these sites are cool” post and thought I might mention http://www.hystersisters.com/ in that. I’ve been meaning to link to Robert Oschler at http://www.pleodinosaur.com/ for a long time too.
spamhound Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 6:20 pm
Matt,
Great post however you should also go after sites that are still selling paid links and actually did not budge as far as PR goes on the last culling.
For example, these 3 sites all have great PR, Interlink and continue to sell paid links that transfer PR:
(pruned)
If your going to get up on the box about paid links, you really need to drop the hammer. Those sites have been reported and continue to do well it making one think that Google has turned a blind eye to specific sites or industries.
[spamhound, I passed these on, but pruned the visible list. The spam report form is a better way to go. --Matt]
Matt Cutts Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 6:23 pm
Oliver Taco, fair enough. One of the big reasons I still like Google is that I feel like I can help make a difference, e.g. the change that the AdWords folks just did to disable ads for lots of “buy PageRank”-type queries. I try really hard to pull Google’s goals to be in alignment with users wherever I can, and I know lots of Googlers who work to keep Google from being just a random big company. But I’m sure some Googlers just think of Google as just a place to work.
By the way, if PointCast makes you feel old, then I feel a little old too.
Isn’t it weird how that “push technology” kind of came full circle with RSS and feed readers?
Matt Cutts Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 6:26 pm
“What about paid directories like Yahoo! or any of the 1000’s of smaller ones? Would Google consider paid directories the same as selling links that pass pagerank?”
Dito, I feel like I’ve already answered that question before — let me look. Ah, here it is. Is it okay if I just copy/paste my previous answer to that question, from http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-to-report-paid-links/ ?
Back then, I said
I hope that helps answer the question of how (say) the Yahoo directory is different from the examples I showed in my post. I hope it also answers the question of why a “bidding directory” that just gives the top slot to the highest money bid might not be as trusted by Google.
Grant Glendinning Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 6:28 pm
Matt, you told Kathy “Some more PageRank on your site wouldn’t hurt” - does that mean you’ll just laugh at my site? I’d even send myself cialis and viagra e-mails every day for 10 years for a PR5. Although admittedly I doubt PR will still be any real factor in terms of SEO. Although you have said countless times that PR is one of ~230 factors of a sites serp ranking, from what I gather the higher the serp you receive the higher the pagerank of that specific page will be (in comparison to a page on, say page 2). Or am I wrong, and Google have some devious plan to turn on our heads yet again?
Aaron Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 6:28 pm
graywolf is trying desperately to find any angle to attack Google and/or MC’s post, and it’s making him look pathetic.
Matt Cutts Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 6:34 pm
Grant Glendinning, you may object to the fact that anybody can edit Wikipedia, but regular users do like Wikipedia. That said, if you want to exclude it from your own searches, just adding “-wikipedia” to your query should do the trick.
Brent Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 6:35 pm
I was thinking the about this paid links discussion so prevalent across the web lately. At first I was on the side where I thought paid links should be allowed. But, as a small web site publisher, I thought again.
How would I as a small website publisher ever be able to compete against large corporations with seemingly endless budgets? They could simply buy their way into the SERPs wherever they feel like and I woud be assed out. Even though I am an expert in the topic my site is about, I would wind up virtually invisible when it comes to search.
I’m glad Google is against paid links. Remember the web is still very young. I think eventually there will be some sort of standard to indicate a link as being purchased.
Josh Garner Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 6:39 pm
Matt,
This issue seems more about the quality of the review than the issue of paid links. If a certain review is so piss poor, then it shouldn’t get the rankings that a well thought blog with competence should, sure. But to use this as a reason for broadly penalizing blogs who sell links seems a little irrelevant.
What if I have an authoritative blog, and I want to review a product? Most services give me the option of taking on the review or not. As a blogger and user, I would only choose products to which I would be able to give a competent review. I would be paid, and I would give my honest review, link to a product that I whole heartedly believe in, and then receive a penalty, or at the least have my PR passing ability taken away. Hardly seems fair.
What if I have a really authoritative blog on a subject, and am approached by another blogger getting into the game; I research the blog, love what I see, and agree to promote his blog. I like his site as a user, and would like to promote it as a blogger. So what if he pays me to do so? So what if giving him a great anchor text would help to move him up. I’m placing my name on it, and I like it. I’m trying to promote it for others to see anyway. As a user, I believe it should indeed rank higher. Isn’t that what you’re (Google) trying to do anyway? Return the results that we as the people want?
I can understand the bad apples that blindly link to others for the cash and little more. But surely there is another way to take those issues on instead of punishing the rest????
If the goal is to reduce spam, by all means more power to you. Google is the one to do it before the others IMHO, but I think the issue should be taken to without casting such a wide net.
Just my 2 cents, as a blogger, AND a user.
Dave (original) Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 6:40 pm
I disagree, in fact I believe was very light on what James is trying to imply!
Kathy Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 6:43 pm
Hi Matt,
Thanks so much. You are very kind to reply and let me know the Google brains are checking things out. Hystersisters.com used to be indexed quite well. Until my penalty. Since my reinclusion the indexed pages just haven’t been the same. (And I have plenty of forum owner friends who have 300+K pages indexed so I know that forum indexing is possible without tools like vbseo url rewrites) Is it possible that when I received re-inclusion I received a purgatory level instead of full grace?
As for page rank, this is a difficult thing too. Wiki article “hysterectomy” links to me as a resource. Other sites too like DMOZ and yahoo directory (back before it was a paid service) link to me. The main page of the site has been a 5 for years. I’ve been trying to figure out how to get internal pages to receive page rank but it eludes me. I don’t understand much about SEO but do what I can to maintain the site. I ignore the phone calls I get at my office almost daily with SEO offers for a price or those spammy emails. I keep trying to do what Google tells us to do: Add quality content and take care to address the needs of your visitors. SEO and PR should come naturally. I keep praying for a reversal with the indexing.
Please let me know if there is anything I can do to get the googlebot to visit my site’s threads. I would appreciate it soooo much!
Jerry Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 6:43 pm
James has a good point. If you legitimately have a useful site and want to increase it’s visibility, it makes sense to try to “prime the pump”, so to speak. I have a few sites like that - a volunteer project if you will, but also the same could go for commercial companies.
If I have a company that manufactures “fuzzy titanium widgets”, I’d like for people to find my site above the crappy, ad laden blogs in the same vein what Matt cites above.
The problem is that there are MANY people *cough* digitalpoint.com *cough* that basically attempt to make their living by creating such ad laden sites and employing all manner of legit and shady techniques to drive traffic, and since Google is the big daddy, everyone has their sights on gaming Google..
But, that puts those of us who want to promote our legitimate sites in a position of needing to try harder to promote our sites, or be relegated to the back pages.
So, it’s an arms race.
Matt Cutts Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 6:45 pm
“How would I as a small website publisher ever be able to compete against large corporations with seemingly endless budgets? ”
I agree, Brent. Just to give you an example of your point, a few years ago there was a search engine that sorted purely by how much money someone was willing to pay for a certain term. If you searched for “Harvard” you would get test prep companies instead of Harvard University. I remember searching for the Red Cross on that search engine, and they’d had to create a fake $50 bid for redcross.org to make sure that the official Red Cross website would show up #1 for the query [red cross]. That’s just really awful, in my opinion. Very few people chose to go to that search engine, and it’s no longer a standalone business.
I think one of the strengths of web search is that with enough creativity and insight, a small mom/pop business can compete very well in their niche. Personally, I’d hate if websearch moved in the direction of that search engine that was sorted by pocketbook, and where Harvard University was nowhere in the top 10 for the query [harvard].
graywolf Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 6:47 pm
And how do you determine what constitutes payment? What about non cash transactions?
If I say James took me to dinner, linking to james is that bad? Is it a paid link if we went to McDonalds? How about if we went for Kobe Beef, foie gras, and truffles? What if we just just got thrown out of Applebees?
Matt Cutts Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 6:49 pm
Dave (original), if James is trying to imply that we’re the same or even related, then he clearly hasn’t been reading here enough.
Kathy, I checked a while back and after leaving behind that particular link exchange, you got full grace.
It would be helpful if you would do a follow-up post on your site to talk about what you’ve done with vbseo type stuff. My best guess is that in the process of trying to do whitehat SEO or streamlining urls, some change was made in the site architecture that block some pages in robot.txt or causes other issues. So a post that says “my urls used to look like bla. Then I made this change and now my urls look like foo.” might help.
graywolf Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 6:49 pm
>“How would I as a small website publisher ever be able to compete against large corporations with seemingly endless budgets? ”
Eliminating paid text link advertising as option, isn’t going to drive prices down, when Google is the only place you’re “allowed” to buy advertising do you think the prices are going to go down and become more affordable?
Matt Cutts Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 6:53 pm
graywolf, was I so clear about paying money for links that you start looking for gray areas (points, coupons, dinner) instead? If so, I’m glad that the post was clear about buying/selling links that pass PageRank for money.
You also said “when Google is the only place you’re “allowed” to buy advertising”. I’m surprised that you would make that claim when there are tons of non-Google places to advertise with no problem at all.
In fact, in our post on the official Google webmaster blog, I addressed exactly this point:
“Q: Is Google trying to crack down on other forms of advertisements used to drive traffic?
A: No, not at all. Our webmaster guidelines clearly state that you can use links as means to get targeted traffic. In fact, in the presentation I did in August 2007, I specifically called out several examples of non-Google advertising that are completely within our guidelines. We just want disclosure to search engines of paid links so that the paid links won’t affect search engines.”
graywolf, please don’t claim that “people can only advertise on Google” when we’ve specifically debunked that idea.
Vic Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 6:59 pm
Matt,
Here’s what I would like to know:
If a site that hosts paid links stops doing so, can it get it’s pagerank (and trustrank) back?
Thanks,
Vic
Dave (original) Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 7:03 pm
Graywolf,
Google hasn’t nothing against paid advertising and never has, IMO. What is does NOT like is when paid advertising is used in an attempt to manipulate the organic SERPs. That is NOT paid advertising and it has an adverse effect on the millions of daily Google users. The Google guidelines are very clear on this…………all one needs to do is read them with a dash of common sense.
Adwords don’t influence organic SERPs
Matt Cutts Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 7:08 pm
“oh and if you don’t think wikipedia medical pages have inaccuracies look at the rubella page, especially discussion and history”
graywolf, I don’t believe I said that Wikipedia pages were perfect. What I did say is that they’re often helpful, users like them, and if you personally don’t want Wikipedia pages in your search results, you can add “-wikipedia” to your own query and you won’t see it any more.
Peter Bird Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 7:08 pm
Matt, if you have a chance can you confirm that links that have been purchased and identified by Google’s algorithm as being purchased (eg on another site; in a bidding directory; etc) do not hurt the site that purchsed them?
If not I will bid for some links in a bidding directory for some competitors sites.
TheOneCallGuy Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 7:11 pm
Matt,
The problem with the internet is that it isn’t the way it was in 1999. People are hoarding page rank/link juice because they know that outbound links can gain them money. So, they charge for it.
Take for example, the Audio/Video Home Theater industry that OneCall.com is a member of. We are one of the top rated Home Theater sites out there. We have great pricing to go with it. However, MOST sites won’t link to us unless there is something in it for them. AVSForum is a great example, HomeTheaterMag.com another great example. I have called these sites over the past couple of years to link to OneCall.com because we are one of the best online retailers in their niche. Will they link to us? Nope! Why? Because we have to pay for it. I have even offered up our affiliate program which pays more than anyone else in our industry. Nope! Why? Because they feel they can make more from Google AdWords instead.
So why don’t I buy one of their links, banners, etc.? Partially because I don’t want to mess up the $600K per month we rake in from Google Natural search revenue by buying a link that may create a downturn. Also, the banner blindness that people have today is getting worse and worse especially among savvy internet users so paying for a CPM model is becoming too expensive.
So, OneCall continues to do ‘okay’ in the SERPs but we are nowhere near where we should be based on our reputation in the niche industry we are in. We are playing by the rules. Following the Google Manifesto, partially out of fear of losing success we are having in the SERPS and partially because I truly believe that Google is Good and I still trust Google that following ‘the rules’ makes the internet a better place.
But sites like OneCall.com are suffering because we follow the rules and that just isn’t right.
Solution??
I believe that this is more of an example of the internet needing to have some ability to officially cite sources more than anything. Humans believe what they read on the internet anymore as truth without question. Take for example all of the urban legend type of emails floating around about how this or that person is dying of xyz disease and everyone please pray for them, blah, blah, blah. If a user spends the time to look up the background 99 out of 100 times it’s a hoax. But people believe the crap and they send it around to everyone and their dog because, damn, it’s on the internet . . . it MUST be true!!
Citing information within key industries (i.e. medical industry, law, etc.) should be nearly a requirement. The world doesn’t want some crackpot wannabe doctor posting wrong information on the web. Adwords forces you to get a pharmacy key to post ads about pharmaceuticals. I feel Google should institute a program where a website can display a badge of authority for key industries. If that badge is displayed (something like a AdWords professional type of badge implementation) then Googlebot gives it much higher credability. If it doesn’t then . . . well it’s just another person’s opinion not a professional’s opinion.
The internet is serving several purposes today. Ecommerce, information, porn, social interaction, etc. etc. etc. For some of these industries we need to do more than just have an algorithm that tracks inbound link authority determine who is and who isn’t the professional. You point out that the medical industry may be the most important place to start.
Brent David Payne
Matt Cutts Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 7:12 pm
“If a site that hosts paid links stops doing so, can it get it’s pagerank (and trustrank) back?”
Hi Vic, we addressed this in our post on the official Google webmaster blog:
“Q: What recourse does a site owner have if their site was selling links that pass PageRank, and the site’s PageRank in the Google toolbar was lowered?
A: The site owner can address the violations of the webmaster guidelines and submit a reconsideration request in Google’s Webmaster Central console. Before doing a reconsideration request, please make sure that all sold links either do not pass PageRank or are removed.”
The only thing I would mention is that I would not recommend removing paid links, applying for a reconsideration, and then add paid links back onto the site. That would strike search engines as very deceptive/spammy and could result in sites being permanently removed from Google’s index.
Vic Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 7:16 pm
Thanks, Matt. The concern is not so much pagerank but that a further penalty may come down the road affecting SERPs.
Vic
Matt Cutts Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 7:24 pm
“One thing you happened to omit is the paid listing for Radiosurgery the first listing is a premium PPC slot. Why is it OK for that listing to pay to influence the SERP’s but it’s not OK for the person who paid for a text link advertisement you showed?”
graywolf, Google does have advertising on our site. Like the vast majority of advertising on the web, it is clearly marked as sponsored and does not affect search engines. In fact that ad most definitely *does not* influence Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs). Google’s ads go through a url redirector which specifically forbids bots and other search engines from crawling, so that we don’t accidentally influence any search engine. In addition, we try very hard to make sure that our advertising helps our users. For example, the first ad that I see for the search “radiosurgery” is irsa.org, which is a very helpful to users.
Now graywolf, I did a post with several screenshots of examples why paid posts can be bad for search engines and the web. You seem to be throwing up a lot of objections like “Wikipedia sucks” or “Google checkout looks like they linked to someone with keywords in the link!” But I think if you go back to the content of my post, most people would not want examples like the ones I showed to affect the search rankings for a serious medical subject like brain tumors.
Oliver Taco Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 7:33 pm
Matt, you’re not old unless you can remember front-panel booting a PDP-8 or paper tape.
Single sided single density Kaypro CPM floppies with PIP don’t count.
_OT
graywolf Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 7:33 pm
>you can add “-wikipedia” to your own query and you won’t see it any more.
Burying my head in the sand and pretending wikipedia doesn’t exist for the rest of the world just because I don’t see it is ignorant at best.
Matt Cutts Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 7:35 pm
Hey all, my wife is kidnapping me for a date night, but I’ll be back later tonight to check in on the discussion.
Matt Cutts Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 7:36 pm
I’ve got to run. Can someone hunt up the recent French study that discusses how much regular users like Wikipedia? If you can’t find it, I’ll hunt it down when I get back from my date night.
TheOneCallGuy Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 7:36 pm
Cool . . . have fun. I look forward to seeing a reply to my comment. I don’t think you have ever replied to my comments. Maybe they are too long.
Brent David Payne
Dave (original) Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 7:46 pm
Seems to me that by the sheer volume of Google searches compared to any other SE, you are in a minority. However, it’s interesting to know you consider yourself in a position to speak on behalf of the “rest of the world”.
graywolf Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 7:48 pm
>Like the vast majority of advertising on the web, it is clearly marked as sponsored
Well we both know there are numerous studies showing that most users can’t tell ads from content on the web. A fact that is complicated by Google Adsense encouraging publishers to make ads “blend” and look like content instead of advertising as much as possible.
And inaccurate results from wikipedia are better than inaccurate commercially influenced results?
As a user I want results that are accurate and truthful, a standard wikipedia doesn’t hold itself to or strive for
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:V
If you were really interested in removing inaccurate results wikipedia would be the first place I started
wethead Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 7:50 pm
Hi Matt,
I see your points very well, BUT where you and GOOGLE seem to fail is
1) Google doesn’t were the “human hat”
Matt, for the love of god , why don’t YOU do that?
AND here is what I mean…..
Ask yourself this ” My sister has cancer, crap…let me find out about treatments”
Your going to tell me that , you would base your family’s treatment on a “google result”….lol come on man.
I see the example you are trying to use so that it can “hit home”
BUT - if it was my FAMILY or even someone I cared about, I would be calling doctors and specialists , NOT reading google.
Maybe a better choice for any example would have been “best xmas toy” or something…
I am actually horrified that you would also put your family’s health in that hands of any search engine for that matter.
The real problem is that the whole world is becoming to based on this digital world…..
“Put your human hat on” and realize there is more to life then “Big oil” or “big search”
America is 3 trillian dollars in credit card debt, These are REAL #’S from REAL sources, so Of course people are trying to make money….
Oh yea and last point…
If selling links is soooo bad….
How come text-link-ads.com still has a PR7 AND indexed , Oh wait I know “Big Oil”………….No way Patrick Gavin could get one of his sites banned,……….I mean after all he started all this link selling …….
Yea - you can try to brainwash the rest of us , BUT me and grey wolf have it figured out for sure
Two key words “google stock”
Oh yea and PS, he is right about wiki
Gronk Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 7:54 pm
hey matt,
quick question. what is the difference between a paid for post on a blog and content that a business pays for to get written by a professional copywriter?
Also I know you keep focusing on the cancer theme of your post but greywolf is addressing the broader issue and I think some of his points are very valid.
Dave (original) Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 7:59 pm
When did Google EVER profess to supply accurate information V.S. most relevant according to its algorithm?
ANY SE who attempts to control the *accuracy* of the information it serves up is on a slippery slope to nowhere. You obvioulsy have a “Big Brother” mind-set already, why would you want to feed that?
Kathy Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 8:04 pm
Thanks Matt. I’ve written an update with specifics. The only thing: My thread urls never changed. I didn’t use vbseo.
Thanks once again. I remain ever hopeful a solution is found.
Next halloween may I suggest a superman costume for you.. if somehow we find a solution. I’ll proclaim you my hero!
uGuX Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 8:10 pm
Matt,
I hope you don’t get too involved on trying to control the quality of the web. The more restrictions you put on webmasters, less and less will be in favor of using and supporting Google. I don’t mean to sound harsh, but this what I really feel.
really interesting Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 8:20 pm
Matt,
Thanks for the post. I’d like to understand this issue in as great of detail as possible and your example helps. Can you elaborate a bit further on the following questions:
1) Given that the core of your justification seems to be that you, as a user, wouldn’t like these posts as high search results, can you please share what the SERPs for these posts were prior to GOOG penalties for search terms such as “radiosurgery”, “brain tumor treatment” and “gamma knife” ?
2) Can you also share what those sites’ PageRank’s were prior to GOOG penalties and after GOOG penalties?
3) If their PageRank’s were changed, are you saying that their PageRank was obtained by purchasing paid links? If not, then how would you explain the policy behind taking away a PR that was properly obtained via organic links etc.? If their properly obtained PR wasn’t changed, then what penalty did they receive?
4) One of the posts you referenced (possibly all), linked to http://www.braintumortreatment.org/ . That site contains an overview on the Gamma Knife brain tumor treatment, an Information for Doctors page, an Information for Patients page, and an Information for Hospitals page — in fact, it cites similar authorities and contains more relevant content than the wikipedia page for Gamma Knife, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_knife . At first blush, that site appears very relevant for searches of “radiosurgery”, “brain tumor treatment” and “gamma knife”. Do you believe that site, referenced by those blogs, is not relevant for those search terms?
Direct answers on these would shed greater light on GOOG’s latest penalties. thx!
Marc Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 8:35 pm
Matt, sorry about naming the company. I didn’t know it was against the rules. If it seemed I was trying to “call out” the company; that was not my intention. I should have taken more than a minute to write that post with less ranting. Feel free to delete it if you want.
I guess what I was trying to say is:
What about paid posts (reviews) that DO use nofollow tags, but the reviews themselves are totally fake i.e. not relevant to regular users? Will Google do something about this deceptive practice?
graywolf Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 8:41 pm
>When did Google EVER profess to supply accurate information V.S. most relevant according to its algorithm?
and inaccurate information is more relevant? if they were looking for relevant irregardless of accuracy (taking the wikipedia NPV stance) then why defuse google bombs like “miserable failure” or “greatest living american”.
rotatedspectrum Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 8:47 pm
Is the detection of paid links/paid directories algorithmic or human?
Peter Bird Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 8:49 pm
Marc: “Will Google do something about this deceptive practice?” - what has this got to do with Google? They are not the internet police.
Chip Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 8:51 pm
Does this just go for text links? We sell ad space on our website, most ads come in from us from some other ad serving platform and it’s in the form of javascript. However, some of our smaller advertisers supply images and links and so in our system, it just spits out as:
href | image | end href
Not done through javascript, just straight up HTML. In no way would anyone confuse it as something other than an ad, but should that no-follow tag be used on the outgoing link even though it’s an image? Does PR get passed even if it’s not a text link?
Thanks,
Chip-
Scott Clark Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 8:54 pm
Ah, Pointcast. I was on the original beta. What a terrific, ahead-of-its-time system. Until a few weeks ago I had one of the original floppy disks (office clean out time.)
Hope you’re well, Matt. If you’re back in Lex any for holidays let’s have a beer.
Dave (original) Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 9:07 pm
That’s a HUGE erroneous leap from my statement: “When did Google EVER profess to supply accurate information V.S. most relevant according to its algorithm?”
To ensure constantly accurate information would require about 1 billion Google employees perpetually cross referencing information on all 10 Billion + pages in it’s Index. Not realistic and borders on fanciful.
Of course, if you have method to achieve any such thing, I’m sure Google is all ears. Please share.
graywolf Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 9:25 pm
Dave I agree, but the objective should be to provide information that’s as accurate as possible. Removing a source that doesn’t strive for accuracy would be a start
Jason Zack Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 9:28 pm
Matt - thanks for pointing out this example of spam/web pollution. I could not agree more that cutting down on this kind of activity will increase the quality of search and the Internet.
However, Google is going to far by saying all links that are transacted are negatively affecting the search experience. Although most paid links are spam, like these (http://daily.stanford.edu), there are some good people out there linking responsibly. When a company that has a product/service that adds value (not an affiliate or lead generator, etc), pays a relevant publishers to display their link, and the publisher consents to the quality of their product and wants to link them based on that merit - this can be helpful the search results. I have seen many examples where major brands had to purchase a handful of links on industry specific sites and now that are ranking for terms that are core to their business. These Fortune 500 companies has no other way to achieve this result. They were not buying pagerank or manufacturing authority. They were just getting some anchor text and focus – their domain authority which has been accrued naturally is what drives their rank.
Adveritsers will always buy links and publishers will always sell them. Brokers will always think of new ways to get past the systemand find a crack (paid blogs, in-content links, etc) . Why don’t you guys try and promote responsibility with linking. Try and educate publishers and advertisers that these links are affecting search results, and that matters a lot (as you displayed above)…be smart with who you link to - paid or not.
SeaRchEnGineSWeb Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 9:30 pm
==================================
EXC-U-USE YOURSELF!!!
YOU ARE NOT BEING FAIR,….. in fact this logic is completely absurd.
It borders on being the most vile reasoning in the history of SEO blogs.
Is this the type of reasoning that goes on behind closed doors at Google???
Is this the type of conversations you all have, then congratulate yourselves on your moral superiority and righteousness???
This post will pick your argument apart and show the world just how unreasonable Google can be.
ARE YOU READY>>>>>>
1- YOU CAN NOT use extreme emotional life and death analogies to make a point about generalities - -NEVER, EVER give in to that easy way out AGAIN. The extremes do not represent the norms.
2- The overwhelming majority of paid links ARE VALID and that represents a more realistic perspective!
3- What other choice are you giving someone after YEARS of not being noticed and playing by the rules?! Should they just remain invisible for the rest of their online lives? Would YOU not finally want to take some action to get traffic? Can you honestly say that if you were in their shoes, YOU would be content to never get anything from your commercial Website?
4- It will take much more than a few blog links to get an important term on the first pages of Google. And for a term link RADIOSURGERY - many many science articles and older specialty sites will be on the top SERPs. So THAT is why Extreme examples do not reflect the norm. Do manipulate peoples emotion through unreasonable fear. They will NEVER trust you again once they become enlightened.
5a- Also, can you DENY that there are no under the table deals going on with large sites that buy massive amounts of ads on popular media sites?
Can you deny that there are not reviews or blog posts given to cement the relationships. Can you deny that Press Releases are not picked up immediately by Hundreds of outlets competing to have 24/7 news - EVEN if they are about minor matters? All of this adds backlinks to a company’s homepage.
5b- No high PR Website is going to GIVE a free link to a ordinary commercial site. Virtually no social site is going to have any ordinary commercial sites.
A high quality informational site or a free software or Web service site are what Webmasters show interest in.
6- What about the admission from an SEO that his firm has clients who by a million Adwords? How the hell is the small guy or gal going to compete?!
7- If Google is so concern about having the best possible results for searchers - would not that extend to taking the sponsor links OFF the top of the SERPs?
Using you own logic - the organic results go there by honest, tenacious competition. The top sponsor links BOUGHT their position with big bucks.
Rememeber, up until a few weeks ago, the entire are was clickable - that is deceiving consumers who may not have known they clicked to go to a site.
8- Essentially, you are no more honest than the rest of society. When it is to your benefit - you rationalize you behaviour just like most others.
There has to be understanding on both sides. Smug moral superiority is not the answer.
Not all paid links are bad. You can not group all paid links under one banner. A Webmaster has every right to charge for a link when there is a competitive market to get a link on that page.
What you fail to understand is that there are just no opportunities for small Webmasters to get attention.
.
.
.
Richard Ball Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 9:36 pm
@graywolf - Hey MG, I don’t think you’re going to get MC to resolve the Google dichotomy. I honestly don’t think he understand that it exists.
Remember when AdWords changed color from blue to yellow? Was that to improve search results relevance or blur the line between paid results and organic results? That had nothing to do with anything Matt’s team did. They seem to operate in a vacuum, unaware how the business side of Google creates a conflict of interest with what they’re attempting to accomplish.
MC, if you really want to tackle search engine spam, convince the AdWords team to display the parked domains from the AdSense for Domains program in reports. For a company whose mission is to organize the world’s information, the selective omission of that crucial information undermines your work. Think about that.
I bet you’re not even aware that your company chooses to hide this information from advertisers, your company’s core customers who provide 99% of your revenue. This is what I’m talking about:
http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=bn&answer=66743
Also, if your read the announcement about the launch of the Placement Performance Report:
http://adwords.blogspot.com/2007/06/introducing-placement-performance.html
you’ll notice this section: “The report also provides a new level of transparency for traffic you accrued from sites in our network that are participating in the AdSense for domains program. Currently, AdSense for domains statistics are collectively reported, but we are working to give you site-by-site level statistics soon.”
That was 6 months ago. How soon is that?
A more recent post on your company’s Inside AdWords blog regarding invalid clicks (and I know you’ve posted about invalid clicks and Shuman’s efforts in that regard in the past):
http://adwords.blogspot.com/2007/07/whats-new-in-world-of-invalid-clicks.html
refers to the site exclusion tool which “can be used to prevent ads from appearing on certain Google content network websites that advertisers don’t feel are appropriate for their ads. Advertisers can get an idea of where their ads are showing by running a Placement Performance report.”
Umm, how can you block individual sites when they’re lumped together into a single “Domain Ads” category? Yes, I know an AdSense for Domains opt out exists. That’s not what advertisers or domainers need. Advertisers need to actually be able to see where their ads run and pick and choose individual domains to block.
Now, can you see why people are having a hard time listening to you talk about paid links and transparency? Your company, Google, is hiding paid links from the advertisers who, to a large degree, fund all of your efforts.
Good luck. Seriously. Others at Google who aren’t as honest and open as you are going to make it difficult for you to be trusted.
Dave (original) Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 9:37 pm
Google DO strive to provide accurate information. However, this does not and should not extend to ‘other’ sites. As I said, attempting to do so is a slippery slope to nowhere.
Google is already the target of “Big Brother” type conspiracies. I see no gain for anyone by living up to that?
JP Fin Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 9:39 pm
It’s a good sample but in some case Google still ranks these sites very well. For example, a few mins ago, I want to find a free tool to convert downloaded youtube video (flv format) to swf so that I can post the video to my blog directly. But when I searched “flv to swf” (without quote), I got a lot of MFA sites, like the #1 of 1,800,000: http://www.brothersoft.com/downloads/flv-to-swf.html (only adsense ads, no result at all) and #2: http://www.downloadatoz.com/howto/convert-flv-to-swf.html (a little usefull than #1, but useless for me).
Btw, here is how to convert flv to swf for free: download a trial version of Adobe Flash and you are done!
Dave (original) Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 9:47 pm
Does that “right” extend to Google.
How do “small Webmasters” get a level playing field when might ($) is right? Didn’t Google prove to the World that it IS possible to rise above the mighty $ and get recognition, fame and popularity without buying the market?
steaprok Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 10:05 pm
I think the more Google tries and explains its reasoning for their stance on paid links, the more they become the anti thesis of their stated objective : Do No Evil. Matt reminds me of Tony Snow, spinning up a storm. And today it was a double PR whammy, with 2 posts on the subject between this blog and the GWMC blog
The biggest problem in my opinion, is the way Google gave it to us, real soft and slowly. Slowly, so we wouldn’t notice that they were giving it to us. I’m referring to the whole us of the no follow. At first they insisted it was for one thing, then another, and before we knew it, we better start pasting those babies everywhere or else!!
or else what? or else we snatch your site from our index and make you go bankrupt because you didn’t put no follows where we wanted you to. The punishment many times does not suit the “crime”
All this is doing is continuing to harbor negative sentiment for a company that callously destroyed peoples whole livelihood with out a single warning to them.
Maybe an extreme example, but effective in illustrating my point. That there are real world consequences of this policy.
Google’s paid link policy causes more problems than it solves. And with all the money, and brain power there @ the Googplex, they really should find a more effective way of handling a flaw in their algo. then to remove a tumor with a rusty battle ax , rather than with a precision scalpel.
Don’t get me wrong, I am a big fan of many things Google, but this in particular sucks!
Thanks-
gaman Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 10:29 pm
I agree with everything about this article but I wonder if your algorithm is able to determine whether a paid post is well written/well research.
What if someone writing a paid review about brain tumor and was able to write an amazingly accurate and honest article about it? Do you still demote their page rank just because they are writing paid review about brain tumor?
My guess is that, such thing might require a manual review. Take JohnChow.com for example, he’s ignoring everything google says about not doing paid review or selling text link ads and he still have PageRank 4. Google is giving mixed message here for not demoting his page to 0.
Perhaps Google realises that his readers actually find some of his paid reviews useful and that’s how he can get away with it. Is that an accurate assumption?
Then what happen if JohnChow.com suddenly write a paid review about a brain tumor treatment and the information is not entirely accurate. Will he get a 0 PageRank then?
Perhaps even with PR4, JohnChow.com has lost its ability to pass along Google Juice so Google couldn’t care less about what he writes?
What about someone promoting an affiliate program related to brain tumor treatment? And let say the link was able to pass Google Juice along. Are you going to do anything about that?
mark Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 10:30 pm
I would hate to get fake radiology serp.
If people do want to make money from their sites and not get penalized, simply include the “nofollow” attribute in the links. I don’t think it’s that hard.
wethead Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 10:44 pm
“Using you own logic - the organic results go there by honest, tenacious competition. The top sponsor links BOUGHT their position with big bucks.”
I agree, I think you should remove the top search results as well,
Michael Martinez Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 10:59 pm
Matt Cutts wrote: “…I hope you’ll agree that you wouldn’t want a serious medical search for brain tumor treatments to be affected by inaccurate or uninformed posts.”
Right. I don’t want to make major life decisions on the basis of what Wikipedia has to say. Please remove it from your “most favored sites” queue immediately, as it seriously diminishes the quality of your index.
Multi-Worded Adam Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 11:15 pm
Hey Matt,
Side observation here and maybe something for future use from north of the border, but that Mayo Clinic article didn’t come up on either google.com or google.ca for me. To be totally honest, I probably never would have come across it were it not for this blog post. Not sure if this is one of those Toronto issues or not, but I figured I’d bring it up since it’s pretty clear that it belongs there, and in the case of the .ca, one of the Alberta Radiosurgery Centre links could be removed. I’m not bitching or anything like that (not trying to, anyway) but just wanted to point that out.
Good stuff, though. I love how the car loan post fits in so well with the Gamma Knife and the Colon Cleanse. They’re so related! Cut out your brain tumors, flush out your insides, and then go for a drive in your newly-leased-on-life-and-0.9%-financing Escalade. No one’s questioning this, right?
By the way, Matt, why are you taking Gray’s bait if you weren’t sure about Wall’s? He’s just pulling an Eddie Haskell move on you.
It’s funny how the people who whine the most about FUD campaigns are the ones that start them.
Multi-Worded Adam Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 11:22 pm
Dave, now I have to educate you.
You see, it’s a scientifically proven fact that Google is only popular because the same webmasters who have no say or voice or influence used that lack of influence to build Google up to what it is. It had nothing to do with being miles ahead of the competition, and it certainly had nothing to do with Google understanding that society suffers from the paradox that the lowest common denominator causes the toughest problems for the most intelligent of our species, a paradox which has magnified itself tenfold thanks to the Internet. Nope. It’s the poor webmasters that have no influence that made Google, and it’s those poor webmasters that will break Google.
I hope you feel really silly for questioning this logic. This bitchslap was brought to you by the letters S, E, and O and by the number PR0.
Kalena Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 11:40 pm
I would also like to know the answer to Chip’s question re image ads.
Brent Said,
December 1, 2007 @ 11:46 pm
Matt, yeah that would be a travesty to see Google looking like the paid-only search engine you wrote about.
If Google decided to officially allow paid links, big budget sites would start buying links and it would be game over from there for all the webmasters who are currently for paid links. Why don’t people get that?
Richard the Younger Said,
December 2, 2007 @ 12:10 am
Hi Matt, I appreciate the work you put in to communicating with the webmaster community. For some, you are providing a resource of great value.
In light of the improvements in webmaster communications via the Google webmaster tools center, I have a question which may be able to be addressed in a general way. Without going into unneeded specifics, I have a site which I can safely say has a form of penalty. This penalty may be quite old, but I only recently became aware. I’ve submitted a re-consideration request twice; one was a couple months ago – no change; the other was about a month ago – after the paid link clarification/crackdown. Each time I submitted the re-consideration request, to my best knowledge my site was in compliance with the Google guidelines. Is mine a special case – or should I wait longer for my latest re-consideration request? If a webmaster cannot seem to find a solution in the normal manner, where should he/she turn to? (tried Google webmaster forums too)
Matt Cutts Said,
December 2, 2007 @ 12:58 am
I don’t know, Brent. I tend to agree with you.
martinsc Said,
December 2, 2007 @ 1:01 am
Both the post and the comments are great and very informative.
Lots of great comments have been made and I’ll try to keep up witih reading all of them.
Matt Cutts Said,
December 2, 2007 @ 1:05 am
“that Mayo Clinic article didn’t come up on either google.com or google.ca for me”
M.W.A., it did for me, but that could be ranking differences between our locations, or possibly personalized search. I’ve seen it be on page 1 and page 2. As far as why I’ve been responding to graywolf, I want to make sure that I debunk some myths (e.g. this is a Google-only issue, or Google is doing this to try to make more money instead of to try to improve our result quality), and he’s been putting the questions out there ready to be answered.
Matt Cutts Said,
December 2, 2007 @ 1:07 am
“I would also like to know the answer to Chip’s question re image ads.”
Kalena, I saw your comment on the webmaster help group first, so I answered it over there: http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help-Indexing/browse_thread/thread/218bef9ae9f83203
Scorpy01, I hope that helps address your question too.
Matt Cutts Said,
December 2, 2007 @ 1:12 am
Richard the Younger, you say that you’ve already tried a reconsideration request and the webmaster forum too? What’s your site name, if you can say it?
Matt Cutts Said,
December 2, 2007 @ 1:22 am
Richard Ball, thanks for the interesting comment. I’m not sure if you’ve seen these links:
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/014378.html
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/015287.html
and this post with screenshots:
http://www.redflymarketing.com/blog/adwords-content-exclusion-beta-a-first-look/
I honestly do appreciate the feedback and the honest criticism. I wouldn’t claim that Google is perfect, but I do think that we try to respond to feedback. For example, at SES San Jose we got some criticism for our stance on paid links while selling “buy PageRank”-type ads. Earlier this week, we disabled ads for a bunch of “buy PageRank”-type ads, and I expect us to do that for more such queries.
Is Google perfect? Nope. Do I secretly sometimes fantasize that Larry/Sergey would run a “CEO for a day” contest, I would win it, and I could change several little things about Google that annoy me? Yup, I’ve daydreamed about that more than once.
But in the mean time, there’s a bunch of Googlers who try to do the right thing and try to make sure that Google does the right thing. That may be hard to believe, but in my opinion it’s true.
Richard Ball, if you’re going to be at PubCon too, please introduce yourself. I enjoy chatting about this more.
Matt Cutts Said,
December 2, 2007 @ 1:25 am
Crikey it’s late. My wife is pulling me off toward bed, so I’ll talk to folks later.
Matt Cutts Said,
December 2, 2007 @ 1:35 am
Oh, one last thing. I don’t remember why graywolf turned a paid links post into a “Wikipedia sucks” discussion, but I promised to hunt down this post about how regular users like Wikipedia: http://aixtal.blogspot.com/2007/11/search-google-yahoo-comparison.html
A few tidbits:
- the author claims that Google is better than Yahoo according to that study
- Yahoo returns Wikipedia at #1 more often than Google, according to the author
- On a five-point scale, “The average mark allocated by users when the result is in Wikipedia is nearly one point higher, in the case of Google and Yahoo, than the mark allocated to other results.”
There’s all kinds of objections I could raise about this study (e.g. I think the queries were self-selected), but it does show how much regular users like Wikipedia.
Arnold Said,
December 2, 2007 @ 1:39 am
“I hope that helps answer the question of how (say) the Yahoo directory is different from the examples I showed in my post. I hope it also answers the question of why a “bidding directory” that just gives the top slot to the highest money bid might not be as trusted by Google.”
Does that mean that Google itself isn’t trusted? After all, adwords lets the highest slot go to the highest payer although granted not in the search results.
The one problem with the examples that you chose is that the two radiological organisations ones are both effectively sponsored albeit self-sponsored. As you would expect neither give information outside the field of radiology which, if one was searching for information about a potential treatment, is bad in that you’d want a more complete picture of what treatments were available.
What does strike me is that there are two very different types of sponsored post around. I do accept that the purely advertising type as illustrated by your examples don’t really deserve to be in search results: essentially they are links with some nonsense around them. However, there are also lots out there where the sponsorship link is essentially used as a trigger for an article: to my mind those ones give the type of in-context links that are appropriate in an index.
Obviously there are also lots that fall at some point between these two extremes.
The question is: are those that use the sponsored link as a trigger for an article and thereby quote it as an example OK with Google?
Lea de Groot Said,
December 2, 2007 @ 2:25 am
I don’t think you’ve presented a solid case for ‘why paid links are bad’.
Surely, the clear quality measure of these sites as *total rubbish* should be enough to downgrade their links?<