Google seems to be stomping on the blogs carrying paid posts. I think in many respects they appear to be making mistakes and lowering ranks of posts that searchers find valuable; in that regard, Google may be cutting off its nose to spite its face. After all, if a high Google PR becomes un-correlated with “trustworthiness” from the user’s standpoint, and Google still gives “low PR” sites high ranks for competitive search results, who will believe the toolbar PR tell us anything about worth or trust?
Still, to protect my highly coveted PR of 0, I’d like to tell Google how they can tell my blog is not chockfull of what they consider to be paid links.
So, to help Google out, I’ll list five features that indicate “no paid link” with near certainty; others are just “strong hints”. Here go:
- Google Adsense in post content: The TOS of most paid posting companies and link selling services generally forbid inserting Adsense in the content of a paid post. Adsense, Adbrite, or obvious banner ads in content means no paid links. (Of course, normal visitor know these are only here to make me money. But whatever.)
- Kontera Ads appear in content after five days. The TOS of most paid posting companies and link selling services generally forbid inserting contextual ads by Kontera, Intellitext or any other service. If you see these in a post, you can bet dollars to donuts there are no paid links.
- Links to a several domains in one post. The TOS of most paid posting companies forbid adding links to anyone other than the paying customer. If I link to Sebastian , Sephy, WebGrrrl, Steve Cronin, Untwisted Vortex, Blog-op, Great Video Clips and Re-emergence, I may have linked for no other reason than because they appear in my Bumpzee widget, but you can be sure they didn’t pay me. (Meanwhile, as I write, I noticed Slevi stopped by.)
- Not an un-ending series of 50 word long posts. The TOS of several companies require 50 words surrounding that dropped link. Others require interim posts with at least 50 words. Loads and loads of 50 word posts often mean lots of paid links. Few generally means no paid posts- though there are exceptions.
- Few inexplicably link to words having nothing to do with the main topic. Like… for example, “mail boxes”. Ok, I just threw that one in after I intentionally visited a blog that I know works for PayU2Blog. The blogger seems to believe those links “blend”.
But, I ask you: Who links the word “mail boxes”? Ok, I could see linking it if you’d just finished an arduous day of shopping for mailboxes, and found an online source. But who links it in an article about- hypothetically- taking her daughter to the ER, and having to deal with doctors bills? PayU2Bloggers do, that’s who!
There’s an incomplete list for Google. I’m sure anyone who visits can now see that I don’t run paid links!
As an added benefit, I bet I’ve opened the Google engineers’ eyes and they’ll now get cracking on new algorithms based on my incomplete list.
Oh… you think engineers with Ph. D.s working on this issue might have figured these five signs out already? I have a Ph.D. in engineering too! And guess what? I think except for precious few bloggers, I’m pretty sure Google already knows how to find most paid links using an algorithm.
That’s why I’m wondering why they keep yammering on and on about how we should add “rel=nofollow”. Sorry, but, can’t you tell?!
Could paid links be made non-obvious? Yep. I don’t happen to run them, mostly because my blog launched after the last toolbar Pagerank update which means no one wants to pay me to linke them. But you know what? If the SEO’s go underground, the way Michael Gray suggest they will, Google will have a very hard time finding paid links.
What’s even more true is this: If Google doesn’t figure out how to detect underground paid links algorithmically they will never detect them manually. Cuz’ let’s face it: Ain’t no-one ever gonna “nofollow” those links!
Definitely valid points made, even though I’m against Google having done this completely I hope that they’ll take it in mind. I foresee the chances to be slim though, I bet they’ve had their reasons for making this rather drastic change.
But I can’t see why they have to punish the one which places the paid links over this matter, if they’re so against it why not just stick to getting the one buying the links out of the rankings?
For something as “smart” as Google bot you’d expect it to offer some sort of service intelligent enough not requiring us to be adding no-follow tags to paid links.
But in the end as probably most which aren’t really into the entire SEO crap I don’t see why they have done this to begin with, isn’t it our choice on how to monetize our pages?
By the way, it’s WebGrrrl with a triple R
“why should Google mind that the PPP network has people posting links to the actual, honest to goodness url for a movie that is about to be launched?”
Because Google aren’t getting paid for it.
That’s all this is about in my opinion, protecting their ad revenue. As you say, no-one’s going to buy irrelevant text links, so they are not negatively affecting the SERPs at all - they’re just not spending the money on an adsense campaign……
I just linked to you from 2 PR4+ blogs on the main page. Now, give me a pretty link spots please. LOL
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I did not know you had a Phd. Figures though as you have always been a brightly intelligent blogger. I don’t think this has anything to do with paid links but everything to do with leverage of market strength.
Seems that some companies put a lot of stock in the Google PR and yet Google only seems to be awarding those sites that ONLY earn revenue for Google. If a site is earning revenue for anyone other than Google, Google is punishing that site. Seems like a conflict of interest to me. But heck, I started my site after the last Google update as well and remain at a 0 after almost 4 months. Who am I to say?
[...] Link Center’s “Useless Link Detector!” thought 6 of the nine links inside my post Five Ways Google Should Know My Posts Do NOT Contain Paid Links are “useless”. Which? In the quote below, I’d linked to seven blogs, the ones [...]