Posted Wednesday, December 20th, 2006. Filed under Google.
There's a highly interesting thread going on at SEOmoz about what Google should officially say about the issue of buying text links. Rand started the thread with comments about the nofollow tag, suggesting Google should acknowledge that a relevant, high-quality link that requires financial compensation isn't necessarily a problem, but that they're good at detecting who's manipulating rankings with link schemes.
Danny chimed in noting that nofollow is a webmaster's way of telling Google "I mean no harm" when buying a link, though he acknowledged nofollow isn't a perfect solution and there's a ton of gray area in what counts as a "paid" link.
My own thoughts: if your site is selling a bunch of spammy links and you get spotted, you'll surely lose your ability to pass link juice. If you're buying links, buy them under the radar; if you're buying a lot of links from sites that are "over the radar," put a nofollow on them and figure your value is the traffic you get for the price you pay, not any Google juice.
Matt later gave Google's official stance: paid links should carry a nofollow attribute, and other choices risk losing trust with Google. Rand disagreed with the logic, arguing it's illogical to ask webmasters to nofollow links when the benefit of not doing so is high and the likelihood of being caught is relatively low.
Let me ask you: if you found a great, relevant page with lots of backlinks, and could get a paragraph of text added with your link embedded that would pass any human review as legitimate, but you had to pay for it, would you nofollow it?
Peter Davis: I think Matt and company would do a better job of finding spammy sites by looking at affiliate links and Adsense ads than trying to figure out what's a paid link and what's not.
graywolf: Build your websites for users, not for search engines... except of course when we don't like it, then you should care deeply that what you're doing makes it much more complicated for us.
Eric Enge: Regarding the Yahoo! directory question, there is a clear difference — a Yahoo! directory link involves a human review by a trusted editor.