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What Should Google Do With Paid Links?

Matt Cutts of Google has said that when a link is paid for and webmasters claim it is not intended for the positive results a link can give in the search engines they should use the rel=”nofollow” attribute in the links so that these links won’t be counted for ranking purposes.

Google has no obligations towards webmasters in relation to ranking a site. Obviously there is also no obligation for webmasters to help Google in ranking sites. So the use of the “rel=”nofollow” is purely free.

Obviously Google has the right to use the links in their site in what ever way they want for their ranking purposes. A webmaster that is interested in maintaining / improving rankings is smart to use the tag as needed to reach his goals.

However, this rel=”nofollow” attribute can be abused as well. You could get rankings for certain phrases and add links to that page to totally unrelated places. Google says in it’s webmaster guidelines:

“Meta tags can exclude all outgoing links on a page, but you can also instruct Googlebot not to crawl individual links by adding rel=”nofollow” to a hyperlink. When Google sees the attribute rel=”nofollow” on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results.”

This suggests that the links with the rel=”nofollow” attributes are totally ignored for ranking purposes and it would mean that the links also won’t affect the rankings of the page they are in.

An example! Philips TV’s are sold all over the world and they advertise a lot. That advertising has a positive effect on sales. The question is, does the advertising result in a higher popularity of Philips? I would think it does.

So it would be good for Google to be able to determine what the intention of a link is, rather than just looking at if it was paid for or not. Matt Cutts claims they are pretty good at determining whether or not a link was paid for. If that´s true they can also determine whether or not it was intended for just search engine ranking benefits.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 14th, 2005 at 10:28 am and is filed under Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

One Response to “What Should Google Do With Paid Links?”

Freehits Says:
June 1st, 2006 at 5:02 pm
The relevence to the pages topic is likely the only real factor to decide it has been bought. This is of course aside from obvious giveaways like foter location, sponsor ads in the text and other.

If you plant a paid for relevent link in the body are in the content, then nobody can say it was bought, unless it appears clear to not contribute to the content of the page.

And if that is the determining factor, then this is nothing new from what Matt said, an doutbound irrelevent link wll get your site less crawled, thus making you less likely to trigger this by linking to anything not complimentary to the page content.

This s like jailing the guy who hires illegals, nobody will sel links if it will bite them, and if its relevent then selling wnt matter nor should it….relevent is good for the reader.