Right, a few days ago I got a newsletter from somewhere (can't remember the source off hand). The email had an article regarding how badly google looks at buying and selling links with other websites.

Now, I can understand why they don't like this practice (I don't agree with them though for various reasons), but what I want to know is what is adsense and adwords? Perhaps this is slightly different, but at the end of the day you are buying and selling links on your site. Why are they penalizing people for doing what they make so much money from doing??

Anyway, just thought I'd bring that up for discussion as I had to read the email a couple of times to 'believe' what I was reading!

Simon

I think google are against selling text links with the intention of purchasing page rank. They aren't againt selling adspace.

Because adsense is javascript there are no text links visible in the source and so its impossible to gain page rank from them.

But really, how would they know that you are selling text links?

Probably the ever wonderful site pro news

stOx is correct
It's down to the common sense thing again. Buy links/ads for the reasons of targeted traffic and sales not for the imagined value of PR/LinkPop. Then if it turns out that the PR boost doesn't show results (as it won't) you have lost nothing and won't feel cheated.

You only have to look at the history of SearchKing to see where buying and selling "PR" gets you.

I understand a little better now.

I wanted to add some text links to my site (to make some money, to be honest) and to buy some links too (to boost the traffic as I don't care too much about rank at the moment). Luckily, the code I'll be using to add links to my site will be javascript so I'd be in the same boat as anyone using the google code then.

But, how does google differentiate between links bought for increasing traffic and links bought to increase PR?

My feeling is that in order to build quality links (i.e. one way on relevant sites) I need to first build traffic, and I have found a good way is buying text links as banners/buttons provide crap returns (at least for me anyway).

Simon

I imagine few people would want to buy a javascript link...

Well, thats the invocation code used by phpadsnew, which is what I use.

If people are looking to build traffic and not PR, surely it shouldn't matter how the link is produced?

thats stupid. What about advertising? So google doesn't like ads either? (other than google adsense)

Google (currently) cannot tell the difference (algorithmically) between a link bought for linkpop/PR and a link bought for the sensible purpose of traffic and sales (linkpop being a side effect), so what usually happens is that the selling site will be blocked (manually) from passing any value through links. Matt Cutts on paid links and Tell me about your backlinks

It's not about "liking or not liking" ads, it's about using methods and means in a attempt to subvert their relevancy algo. By all means buy your links if that's what you do, BUT buy them for the advertising/qualified traffic value NOT the hope that raising PR will somehow magically get you to the No 1 position.

Nice one, thanks for the links, I'll check them out.

I just remembered that they say to add the "nofollow" attribute to links too.

Simon

I don't see how they could effectivly enforce any "no buying links for PR" policy without completely scrapping thier PR algo or to stop using backlinks to judge how reliable a site is.

In a way they have made a rod for thier own back. Page rank was invented by google, webmasters have 100% power when it comes to adding text links to thier site, so it dosn't take a genius to know that eventually webmasters will add links for money.

If you are selling text links you will get only a small % of potential income by adding a nofollow attribute. And if you want to add outgoing links because the sites really are good and you do it for free, but add a nofollow attribute, it will make page rank nonexistant. They would have no way of calculating page rank.

Google need clean backlinks to make thier page rank algo work, yet they are going to punish people for selling them. If they are going to do that then they HAVE to make public how they are going to judge the difference between paid text links and genuine backlinks. Otherwise it will end up in a huge mess with honest sites getting punished because google didnt think something through.

Here, here,

Good argument!

Simon

You can sell links its not a problem but use ref="nofollow" artibute so that search engine won't index the link. Matt cutts has mentioned in his blog about this visit here to see


Free article submission | Web design company | Submit your articles free

The issue with using the nofollow flag is you are telling the SE that you don't trust these links that you have placed on your site, as this was the use the flag was developed for.

A few other discussions in the same vein;

http://www.ihelpyouservices.com/foru...threadid=20951

http://www.ihelpyouservices.com/foru...threadid=20697

http://www.highrankings.com/forum/in...howtopic=19214

http://www.highrankings.com/forum/in...howtopic=19065

http://www.highrankings.com/forum/in...howtopic=18933

Thanks for the links.

I guess it's something that only Google could answer!

Wouldn't it turn Google PageRank on its head if G decided buying/selling links is illegal? I can't see how they could enforce a policy against it.