Is Google biting off more than it can chew?
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With regard to paid posts, Jeff Jarvis at Buzzmachine.com left the following comment several weeks ago:
…This is about SEO, folks. It’s not about people reading and trusting PPP bloggers. It’s about Google seeing the links…
The vast majority of bloggers I know are in willing violation of Google’s policies with regards to linking.
When we all dipped our toes in the blogsphere world, one the first things we find is communities of like-minded bloggers that want to exchange links. We’re told it will help our page rank and drive traffic to our site. We weren’t aware that in doing so we were violating Google’s policy:
Google works hard to ensure that it fully discounts links intended to manipulate search engine results, such link exchanges and purchased links.
Note that Google treats link exchanges the same as purchased links when the intent is improve page rank. Of course, how Google would ever divine the intent of 70 million bloggers is beyond me, but I’m sure they have an algorithm for that. Or will soon.
Did your buddy ask you to pimp his post about a digital camera so he could move up two pages in the SERPs?
Violator.
Did a bunch of folks on your book review forum put together a link exchange to try to improve page rank?
Violator.
Have any ad on your site that doesn’t have a “nofollow” attribute?
Violator.
Google uses links to determine the relative value of a website, but then tells you there are ‘good’ links and ‘bad’ links. And asks you to report bad links, a procedure so rife with the potential to cause chaos and irreparable harm as to be irresponsible. Because they haven’t created an algorithm that reads minds, they want you and I to do so.
Discounting links is a bad policy. It goes against everything Google supposedly is about - it isn’t scalable because it can’t be automated, and the potential for exploitation by ethically-challenged webmaster is in direct conflict with the “Do no evil” mantra at Google. With regard to paid posts, it also ignores the fact that someone thought enough of the link to write a post about it, regardless of the motivation, automatically creating value for the reader that goes beyond the value of the link.
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