Google | nofollow | SES

Posted • August 28, 2007 • Comments Off

SES San Jose to follow or to nofollow that is the question.

Paid links were the most controversial topic at this years SES San Jose.

Here is a great, although 18 minute long video on Google’s paid link policy. The video is by WebProNews MC’d by Michael McDonald. The video features SEOmoz.com’s Rand Fishkin and Wolf-Howl.com’s Michael Gray. The topics: paid links and the effects of Google using paid links.

In a post by Rand, he includes an “if I were Matt Cutts” quote.

Paid links, in Google’s opinion, pollute the search results. The people on the search quality team are spending a lot of time and brainpower fighting back by detecting and devaluing paid links. Thus, if you’re a webmaster, we’d urge you not to buy links for the perceived value that you think they might provide in helping to rank your site better. We’ve got a ton of very smart people cutting off the flow of link juice from those links and you’re going to be wasting your money. If you want to buy links for traffic or branding or other marketing purposes, that’s great, but be aware that we’re not going to count them in our rankings.

In my opinion Google is just jones-ing to corner the market on the value of paid links. They sell paid links how dare anyone else be able to take advantage of this without them being able to take their slice of pie. But, this is the way you would expect a monopoly to react anyway, isn’t it?

late,
gary pool

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