SEO Blog

Last week Matt Cutts head of the Google Webspam team posted on his blog how to report paid links to Google using Google’s Webmaster Console. The news got the SEO industry almost fired up when Matt himself asked people to report link buyers and sellers.

Obviously Google is trying to ‘devalue’ links that are being paid for, However since no official announcements has been made, Google has kept everyone at their toes for the time being. As soon as this news was spread many webmasters has reportedly removed all paid links from their site. It seems that most of the webmasters do not want to be penalized by Google for any reason at all.

However Many SEO Experts has laughed at the whole idea of Google and said that there is simply no way Google can actually distinguish between paid and free links. For example - If I link to Matt Cutts is there any way Google can tell whether Matt paid me to link to his site? Well, I don’t think so!

Matt Cutts mentioned that sites that routinely sell links might lose their ability to pass PR. I’m not sure how successful Google has been in determining the sites that are selling links, however very recently there was a PR update by Google and a massive number of website has been penalized as their PR dropped by 1 or 2 and even in same cases 4 units on the 11 unit Pagerank scale. The Pagerank of two very popular webmaster forums – DigitalPoint & V7N has been decreased to a Pagerank of 6 along with a lot of other websites. Many webmasters are very frustrated as they are not very sure of what’s happening.

Google is encouraging webmasters to use the unauthenticated spam report form and to report any website buying/selling links. But since the whole system is unauthenticated, many are afraid that this service might be abused by the rival companies. However Matt later did confirm that these spam reports won’t directly cause a site to lose rankings. Google Engineers are going to use these reports to test out some of their new techniques.

Even though this new so called ‘new technique’ has been openly criticized by many SEO, this is how Matt Cutts has put it.

“If a site is selling links for Traffic, then its will be happily accepted by Google, however if the site is selling links which will help the less dominant site to achieve good PR then both of the site will be penalized.”

“Things like JavaScript, the nofollow attribute (or meta tag), or doing a link through a redirect that is robots.txt’ed out would be techniques to sell links for visitors/traffic, as opposed to trying to influence search engine rankings.”

And Lastly Matt confirmed that this isn’t another April fool Joke by Google!

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