Welcome. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Don't forget to leave a comment. I * DO * FOLLOW so you get a link back.
Visit Firestorm Forums for Free Traffic and Promotion Resources

As long as we’re talking about links, this seems like a pretty good opportunity to talk about a simple litmus test for paid links and how to tell if a paid link violates search engines’ quality guidelines. If you want to sell a link, you should at least provide machine-readable disclosure for paid links by making your link in a way that doesn’t affect search engines. There’s a ton of ways to do that. For example, you could make a paid link go through a redirect where the redirect url is robot’ed out using robots.txt. You could also use the rel=nofollow attribute. I’ve said as much many times before, but I wanted to give a heads-up because Google is going to be looking at paid links more closely in the future. Matt Cutts

Relevance is an illusion Google wants to maintain

We are led to believe that Google’s war on paid links is to keep it’s search engine results relevant. We know only too well that those of us who are monetizing their blogs with paid reviews and text links are at risk of losing any page rank they might have achieved and of being buried somewhere deep in the Google black hole of death … all because we dare to make Google more irrelevant than it already is. It’s a cause and effect that enrages webmasters who want to rate well in the world’s dominant search engine. Many feel this is part of a ploy to force them to buy ads on Google to get noticed.

How Relevant is This Google?

Let me show you a very typical example of Google’s relevance that has nothing to do with paid links or reviews. Below is a screenshot of the current Google Hot Trends page.


I clicked on the first Hot Trend, Richard Kuklinski, an infamous Mafia hitman known as the Ice Man. Notice that there are three blogs that Google has chosen to list under Blog Posts for the “Hot Trend” Richard Kuklinski. Notice also that 2 out of the three are nothing more than Splogs. Not only are they splogs, but they are Google splogs … Blogger blogs. The very first splog simply bypasses the splog altogether and redirects to a completely irrelevant page shown in the second screenshot below, “Get a Free Samsumg 42″ HDTV”, “Get a Free Laptop Computer”, “Get a Free Canon EOS Digital Camera” … well, you get the idea. Read the rest of this entry »

» Post Purchase:  Text Link

Popularity: 14% [?]

10 Comments »