SEO peeps - is this true?
 

I subscribed to an SEO tip of the day mailing list and received this:

Did you know that Google does not encourage the selling or buying
of links. Matt Cutts has said that Google is good at spotting them.
Web sites that sell links will lose their trust in the search engines.

Don't buy or sell links.

FACT: yes, it's true. Google even has a system now where people can report links purchased for SEO purposes.

Yes, its true. Buying links for the sole reason of gaining backlinks and pr is frowned apon by google. They will even go as far as to you ban you from the search engine.

whats so hard for people to understand? if you are trying common ways to manipulate you search results... google is trying to stop it.

You have to be

http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b1...hizuno/yb6.jpg

As per: http://www.google.com/support/webmas...topic=&ty pe=

Why should I report paid links to Google?

Google and most other search engines use links to determine reputation. A site's ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it. Link-based analysis is an extremely useful way of measuring a site's value, and has greatly improved the quality of web search. Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of links count towards this rating.

However, some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying links in order to improve a site?s ranking is in violation of Google's webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results.

Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:

* Adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to the <a> tag
* Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

Google works hard to ensure that it fully discounts links intended to manipulate search engine results, such link exchanges and purchased links. If you see a site that is buying or selling links, If you see a site that is buying or selling links, let us know.We?ll use your information to improve our algorithmic detection of paid links.

yes thats why you should do it discreetly
i have been doing good with fuzebox's one way text links

http://www.gofuckyourself.com/showthread.php?t=730014

he is very discreet, so you wont get snitched on by others because they wont know...sexy

thanks guys

For what its worth, I think someone reported one of my sites, because I swear to god, I was in the first page for a couple keywords and getting some awesome SE traffic, and I mean awesome. Then all of a sudden, i'm now hovering around 750-800th rank for the same keywords and have never recovered and changed nothing. Probably an overzealous surfer trying "to do their part". I can see how this could be used to kill your competition, so to speak...

Well they'll know now!!! :)

nice info here,thanks

its bs
while they want to get rid of paid links
theres no working mechanism yet.

The info is correct, and has been confirmed in interviews on webmaster radio with Google.

:2 cents:

I've had a couple sites slide all the way from #1 to the end of results or off the results when I haven't done anything new to link them, paid or otherwise. Can someone put up a lame link and then report it to knock something out of the engines?

thats one of the many pitfalls their approach has and the reason
I think it doesn't work yet.
Their main reason was to get rid of some high pr links from trusted sites,
they really have no way of doing this on a large scale.
I don't think they act based on user reports as theres no way to verify the
information.

Its called google bowling.

http://www.google.com/search?sourcei...google+bowling

You got hit by the end-of-results penalty (one of it's many names). I had the exact same thing happen last Christmas. I theorized on a few SEO boards that there was a correlation between top 10 rankings and the penalty (i.e. you won't get the penalty unless or until you're in the top 10 for targeted phrases) but nobody would concur, but your case seems to be yet another affected by this.

Whether it's to do with someone reporting you is debatable, however.

Google will never penalize anyone because a link is placed on another site to yours, even if you bought it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! THINK ABOUT IT FOR A SECOND!!!! If they are really doing this all I need to do to get my competitors in trouble is bring up a fake website saying I sell one way links and place a link to my competitors site on my site along with other bogus URL's and then report them to Google!!! there will be way to much fraud from webmasters who want to destroy their competitors rankings!

No need to think about anything qtip. Google has admitted to penalizing people.

Get with the program.

:disgust

True,this is bullshit.You can make fake link farm,put competitor link,and then report him as buyer so that's way this system is bullshit.

Course it's true. Very old news however :)

for the SEO peeps it can be old news but for me who is trying to learn or understand a bit.. is not.. :thumbsup

would you be interested in doing some work for us?

fuckoff google.

i love baidu.

:1orglaugh !

Great tip btw!

what the fuck, cant purchase links? thats bullshit

That's totally fucked up. What if the report was erroneous? What can you do to fight back to get back up there? How can you report back or object to a report? Seems to me you can't, and once you get penalized, you're permanently fucked. Any better ideas?

Organic content based links are the only way to go. This is exactly why phrase links work so well. Impossible to detect and the link IS relevant not just some sidebar link in the middle of the page somewhere.

See sig (bliggo.com) to read about phrase links.

Well, it's not that easy, they'll be careful for sure, but a PR8 site with totally unrelated sites in the footer would certainly catch their attention.

Btw, there are much easier ways to hurt your competitors rankings or even move them to the supplemental. You'll probably say that's not true and impossible, I did until it happened to one of my sites...and it didn't take long to figure out how the fucker did it.

yes true, bottom line is they want things as organic as possible.

Yes, that's true.

if we don't care about PR to our sites.. we can buy as many as we want.. depends if the sellers want it or not. is that right?
is this different with unrelated sites promoting as affiliates?

Welp, I think I figured out why I dropped rankings. According to Google Webmaster Tools, I've got errors on my site crawls:

HTTP errors 0
Not found 2
URLs not followed 8
URLs restricted by robots.txt 0
URLs timed out 1
Unreachable URLs 5

So i've fixed the problems listed so if this works then I know what causes this problem :)

From what I've seen it's likely more than just site errors that got you penalized. Check out the well-known SEO forums (I can't link to them here) for some very detailed threads on this topic.

Still a lot more questions than answers.

But for those of you who skimmed over Chio's post, go back and read it: It's the best advice in this thread ... so far :)

Shit is that why I went off the map? I forgot to put the "http://" on one of my links and it said I had 324923423 errors. I fixed the problem but only a fraction of the errors have yet be corrected by the crawl.

Its true that they are trying to develop such system. But how on the planet you can tell that link is purchased for advertisement, branding, traffic or for goddamn PR?

Its all BS. I have had ranking with all artificial links and things still are same.

In doing some research tonight, sounds like I got hit by the "end-of-results" penalty, which from reading a ton of forums, could be errors on the site, keyword densities, etc etc. Seems like Google danced and everyone isn't too sure what the hell happened, what I do know however, is everyone has had alot of sleepless nights repositioning their sites after the June dance and trying to figure out what the hell happened.

i noticed a very high pr site selling links for pr recently but it doesnt look like either side is penalized.

look at the bottom of www.phpbb.com (pr9 ), those linsk must be worth gold. funny to they would link to a casino, when casino's are usually the worst for spamming phpbb forums.

it's called an algorithm update.

Thanks for that.

Actually what I was trying to refer to is WHAT in the algo update changed - there are WM with sites over 200K pages that ended up having to redo their entire sites to have Google re-index them back to where they were.

So I guess Google thinks my site is spammy now and dropped me out of the SERPs. I'll play with my inbounds all this week and see if I can't pull it out of the mud :)

It's hard to imagine they could detect such things automatically.

What they are possibly going after is huge networks (e.g. freehosts) suddenly displaying a link on every subdomain/subpage, high PR sites linking to sites sites without any authority or trust...that's easy to detect.

They are banning clients from adsense with a bot, too, I don't see a reason why they should handle paid links penalties by manual verification only. In the past they always had a "kill them all and then sort out the innocents" strategy.

In court, there is a presumption of innocence, for google it's the other way round.