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Matt Cutts Talks About Paid Links
Posted by Scott on 7th December, 2007 | 8 commentsWe all know how much Matt Cutts hates paid links that transfer page rank. Each time he speaks about the issue he sheds a bit more light on his and Google’s philosophies and policies. Matt is an interesting guy to talk to. He is clearly very smart, friendly, and loves what he does.
- He’s totally fine with paid links that don’t transfer page rank (rel nofollow, which is how Adwords works)
- He’s mainly going after sellers of paid links, not buyers.
So, two things for link buyers: 1) It sounds like you’re reasonably safe for now, but 2) The value of your paid links is on the decline because the sites where you bought the links have less link juice to pass along after the page rank penalties that they have incurred.
Matt sounds very serious about curtailing paid linking, so I’m sure sites that accept paid reviews like ReviewMe will be next, since sites accepting PayPerPost and TextLinkAds have already been hit with page rank reductions.
The great thing about Matt is that he takes the time to investigate individual problems and issued raised by publishers. He has a notepad where he keeps track of everyone’s questions and actually follows up.
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Friday, December 7th, 2007 at 5:21 pm and is filed under Web Business. If you like this post why not subscribe to my full text RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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Nice one, you could be brothers!
I wonder where “Google pulling the plug” ranks in these company’s Risk Registers!
Hope you are enjoying LV. Soooo jealous.
J
I understand the benefit of links for seo purposes but that can’t be the only benefit to “advertisers” that use these services.
Are any of these companies like reviewme, payperpost, or text link ads trying to go legitimate by adding or enforcing google’s nofollow rule on paid links, or are they just burying their heads in the sand hoping the problem will go away?
There’s a lot of finger pointing going on but ultimately, I don’t think there’s much that these paid link services can do to placate google. Google doesn’t want people messing up organically occurring links and page rank, but boosting page rank is the main reason why people buy links.
I do think paid reviews offer more value than just SEO benefit though. A paid review on a blog can gain long term RSS subscribers for the recipient. Simple paid text links, though, typically are bought just for their SEO value since traffic through those links is very low.
I think paid reviews is a legitimate way to advertise. (It’s really no different than a paid press report - except that is has the publishers slant instead of the advertisers.) I understand Googles stance on the links with nofollow that are included in a paid review. They are merely a paid text link, but if Google keeps throwing around these penalties (and they probably will) then there won’t be many sites doing paid reviews because of the potential PR and Serps slap. The only way I see for a paid review site to stay successful is to require nofollow for the included links.
It’s interesting to see where all these will go, you know - Google and those who are buying and selling text links. Free love links are the best thing - no punishment for either party, why bother paying money?
This just reinforces what we in the blogging industry have already decided, that PageRank is irrelevant.
Pagerank may be irrelevant, but with the recent PR bloodbath which came in stages (my site went from a 6 to a 4 to a 3 and to zero), I was concerned that the next “level” would be SERPs.
So I removed my paid links, submitted a reinclusion request with an explanation and to my incredible suprise, within TWO DAYS I had a pagerank 4 again. I thought it would take months…
Vic
Hi!,