161–170 of 306 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you were selling links Google isn't that far off...
I'm selling complete ads, that certainly contain links, just like Google does. They are contained in posts clearly marked as sponsored posts. These are not link farms, spam, or payed links. Advertising should not be a crime.
> Site owners and publishers are now afraid to link to each other because they don’t know how Google might respond to that link. For example, Wikipedia and the New York Times have added the “nofollow" attribute to most of the links outside of their editorial control. I'm a little confused why he cares about nofollow links--if Google doesn't "own" the internet, what does nofollow matter? It's certainly better than not…
Furthermore, the "credit" he so desperately wants publishers to receive is only a thing because of Google Page Rank in the first place. That makes no sense. Citing an original source, such as an article that inspired your own work or with relevant background for ideas you're building on, is common courtesy in any field, and it's directly useful to your readers in the Web case. Amazing as some people apparently find i…
The OP is against "nofollow" links which only affect search engines. The links work just fine in a browser and visitors won't know the difference. Publishers aren't scared to link, they're just wary of vouching for a site by not using nofollow.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you even read the article? > Apparently Google convinced them, via their Webmaster Tools portal, that the link looked “unnatural”, and that they should use the Link Disavow Tool to discredit the link.
Yes and that's exactly my point. The email doesn't mention anything about Google, it just says they are cleaning up their links and if it's not a big deal please delete the links on your site. This isn't uncommon, just like it's not uncommon to get emails soliciting links. The OP has come up with a theory about the backstory and then used that theory to blame Google for ruining the internet (ignoring the fact that th…
Jeremy Palmer is a SEO marketer, who also appears to be doing some scammy affiliate thing. Google considers his links low quality because they are low quality.
Please do research before you judge :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The way the DMCA works ISPs or any other service hosting third-party content must comply with every takedown notice immediately, regardless of it's legitimacy, if they want to continue to enjoy the protections of the DMCA. (meaning, unless they want to accept liability for the copyright of every piece of content on their servers). So yes, it absolutely does work that way: you can send a takedown notice to anybody for…
Someone needs to send a couple of millions DMCA takedown requests from random sources to random targets, to make this problem visible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My understanding is selling links is an SEO scam. Are my "ads" a SEO scam or are they real companies to trying to sell real products to real people? How can you conflate the two?
Would your advertisers be fine with you adding nofollow? If so, do that and you're fine. If they aren't fine with nofollow you should realize that the other stuff is window dressing and you're really selling pretty links (which means watch out, Google is looking to penalize you). Real companies selling real products to real people get in trouble for scuzzy SEO all the time. JC Penny comes to mind. Or RapGenius (thoug…
Let's say a reader of mine is searching for a job and my site has a new great job at Apple. Apple advertises on my site because it attracts a certain kind of person. Shouldn't that person be shown my ad because it's both timely and highly relevant?
That the job is on my site is a valuable signal. I don't use an ad service, I place every single ad and I have done so since the start. I check every single link. I check every single ad. I personally talk with every single advertiser.
It's not hard for me to imagine an algorithm that does similar sorts of calculations. Oh, this link goes to apple. I've heard of them before. It's for a job. Scalability Engineer seems to be a valid occupation. Looks OK to me.
You are saying all such signals have no value and should be filtered by nofollow?
In actuality I've not given nofollow much thought. I guess I may now. I've lived by the idea of creating quality content, being honest, and doing a good job, thinking Google will figure it out. That unfortunately doesn't seem to be the case.
The irony in this age of targeting and personalization valuable signals are being lost.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you are selling "ads" that transfer PageRank, you are selling links. I do not care that you do this, but you should be aware of what you are doing.
My understanding is selling links is an SEO scam. Are my "ads" a SEO scam or are they real companies to trying to sell real products to real people? How can you conflate the two?
Google has established these rules to prevent the commoditization of PageRank. They want links to represent an editorial choice and indicator of quality, not marketing budget.
There is nothing wrong with selling ads and visibility on your site to companies that wish to purchase this, but you should nofollow the links to prevent running afoul of Google's TOU.
Again, I don't care if you sell links on Fiverr and make a million dollars. I'm just explaining the rules to you.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When SEOs break the quality guidelines of all major search engines (not just Google), then they might need to do some work to clean things up if they get caught. This still seems to be missing the point. As I understand it, sites that are not doing anything in the realm of SEO can get penalized because of the actions of people outside of their control. If the wrong sorts of sites (however defined), sites outside my c…
"If the wrong sorts of sites (however defined), sites outside my control, are linking to my site, why am I penalized, and why should the burden be placed on me to go fix it?" Well, if a website was link spamming then it seems appropriate that the site should attempt to clean up the spam they made before they can rank well in Google again. Otherwise it's not fair to the other websites that have been trying to rank fai…
Rather than these fear mongering tactics, why can't Google just ignore spammy links instead of penalizing the whole websites and all the websites that link to them?
However—and I think this is the point of the article—use of nofollow doesn't just disincentivise spam links, it also means that many valid and useful links no longer contribute to PageRank.
It would be great if we could have a way to allow all to links contribute to PageRank, but still protect ourself from spam.
Which got me thinking…
At the moment the only options for site owners are to say "yes, I endorse this link" or "no, I don't endorse this link" (by adding nofollow). Instead I could imagine something more fine grained, a system where site owners could tag specific content within their site as coming from specific users.
Content tagged like this is neither endorsed nor disavowed, instead responsibility is pushed to the user who wrote the content. In other words site owners would be able to say something like this to search engines: "this content is created by user X, don't blame me if it's spammy!".
Smart search engines could use this more fine-grained content ownership information in their search algorithms. That means they wouldn't need to throw out all user contributed information on the internet just to protect the internet from spam.
There are a few challenges, of course. :)
* How to identify users? (Anonymously?) * How to have users endorse content on different sites? * How to work out which users are trustworthy? * Building a PageRank algorithm that incorporates fine-grained trust information.
But it's fun to think about technical solutions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"You should never know in advance a link is coming, or where it’s coming from. If you do, that’s the wrong path." That is an absolutely ridiculous rule of thumb to follow. What exactly is wrong about doing something like: 1) Having a good article on your site about a certain topic 2) Reaching out to other site owners who have similar content and asking them to link to you as an additional resource 3) Getting that lin…
dchuk, that's a direct quote from Bing, not Google: http://www.bing.com/blogs/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/201... It's in the "Links are all I need" section. Here's the full quote: "While important as a vote of confidence for the content they point to, there is simply so much link spam these days that it’s tough to know where to turn. Obviously buying links is a dead end, and it doesn’t matter how you split this ha…
This practice has existing long before Internet, and internet has made it easier than ever. Google is essentially telling us not to ask our customers to evangelize for us.
Why such hypocrisy? How about the invites system Google uses for many products including Gmail where users are encouraged and incentivized to invite friends.
According to Google's terms if I link to my Dropbox referral link on my blog, Dropbox should be penalized for it because they incentivize users to do that.
The internet should not work according to Google's algorithm and policies, it should be the other way around.