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- When Google comes down on everyone else for not using “nofollow” on external links, one would think that they would make sure they they were in compliance themselves. However, there are some examples of Google’s failure to follow their own policy and, therefore, are themselves contributing to the pollution of the Google Index.
To rehash, here is what Matt Cutts said on how a webmaster should treat a paid link:
If you want to sell a link, you should at least provide machine-readable disclosure for paid links by making your link in a way that doesn’t affect search engines. There’s a ton of ways to do that. For example, you could make a paid link go through a redirect where the redirect url is robot’ed out using robots.txt. You could also use the rel=nofollow attribute. I’ve said as much many times before, but I wanted to give a heads-up because Google is going to be looking at paid links more closely in the future.
And here is why that disclosure is so important to Google
As someone working on quality and relevance at Google, my bottom-line concern is clean and relevant search results on Google.
So, now that we have a better idea of how strongly Google feels about paid links, how are they doing? When they link out to someone who has paid them or entered into a partnership with them, are they using “nofollow” on those links? Let’s check a few.
Michael Gray has a great post that illustrates Google’s failure to follow their own policy about using “nofollow” on external links.
Golfballs.com gets a sweet PR6 backlink after using Google Product Search:
If you check out that article on Google’s blog, you will even see that further down the page, Golfballs.com gets a super-sweet deep backlink from Google for the keyphrase “Titleist Pro V1 Golf Balls”. If you view source on that page, notice – no “nofollow”.
Here is another one:
Google press release gives Motorola a nice little backlink
Again, view source on that page – no “nofollow” applied to that link either.
Now, if one webmaster A entered into some type of financial partnership with webmaster B and, during an announcement of that partnership, webmaster A placed a backlink to webmaster B, webmaster A would be required to use “nofollow” on that link or run the risk of having PR removed. I filled out a “paid links report” on these pages, so maybe they will have their PR stripped along with the rest of us who did not use “nofollow” correctly.
Of course, I am sure that this is just an oversight. As Michael points out, Google intends on fixing it and this is certainly a relatively small issue. But why would they not make sure they are in compliance with their own policy before implementing a sweeping change that negatively impacted so many sites?
Kudos to Michael for finding these and he has several more examples listed on his blog.
More Thoughts on Google Penalties »
Like many other blog owners, we offer space to advertisers. If our blog theme is related to the particular product they offer, they may want to be listed on our site. That is taking advantage of the power of the Internet.
Google, however, is concerned that web site owners will simply sell space (and a link to their web site) to anyone and everyone and I can totally understand their concern. There are countless examples of people simply wanting to “buy” a link on a popular site in hopes of getting a boost in PR. It is lame, spammy technique and has been abused for years. Google does not want a site to benefit by using techniques like this and I completely agree (although if you Google “buy links” you will see that the sites listed as sellers of links still have PR. Hmm, must be a mistake.).
Anyway, what I don’t agree with is Google’s practice of lumping together ALL sites that sell advertising space because they can’t figure out which ones are spammy and which ones are just trying to advertise related products or services legitimately. In its current form, Google is penalizing us along with blatant spammers.
The fact that we have some advertising showing on our tech blog does not change the quality of our site’s content. For example, here are a few of our more popular posts:
- What To Do if You Suspect Identity Theft
- McAfee Offers Free Rootkit Detector
- Setup a Secure Home Network
- Secure Your Wireless Router
- Small Businesses Increasingly Targeted by Hackers
Those are posts that get hundreds and hundreds of views each month. We wrote them to be of service to our readers. If we make some money because of them, great. But we wrote them because we thought they contained important, quality information. So, just because we sell some advertising, all of a sudden the content on our site is polluting Google’s index and we get our PR stripped? Are you kidding me? That does not add up to me, but, whatever. It is your Search Engine. Do what you want.
If the only penalty for selling advertising was a reduction (or complete removal) of Pagerank, fine with me. I could really care less about Google pagerank in its current format. Although a reduction in PR certainly can hurt the perceived value of advertising on a particular site, that is about all it does right now. Pagerank fails as an effective tool for determining the value of a given web site. It is broken and only seems to really matter to newbies that don’t know any better. Don’t get me wrong – Pagerank is worth something because Google says that it is and they control an almost 60% market share of Internet searches. But it certainly is not the powerful tool that it could be or maybe even used to be.
In the end, while I did not really care that our PR was stripped, selling a few ads each month is not worth the risk of having our web site removed from Google’s Index and that is exactly how Google wants us to react. Since our tech blog was manually reviewed by Google and found to be selling advertising, we had to make adjustments to avoid the risk of de-indexing; we could not just sit back and hope that Googlebot didn’t notice.
November Search Engine Market Share »
There were no significant changes in Search Engine market share from October to November ‘07, according to Virginia based Internet information provider comScore. Google is still way out in front compared to the others and, although Yahoo! dropped and AOL/Time Warner grabbed a little more share, everyone basically kept their same positions in November.
Of the 10 billion searches tracked, here is how they broke down during the month:
- Google captured 5.9 billion
- Yahoo! accounted for 2.2 billion searches
- Microsoft dropped just below the 1 billion mark at 984 million
- Ask was used 463 million times
- and AOL/Time Warner sites were used for 453 million searches.
AOL/Time Warner had the largest jump during the month (0.3 points) and Yahoo! had the biggest drop of -0.4 points.
For all you visual people out there, we have a pretty, little Flash graphic in the right column, so check it out 
Paid Links, De-Indexing and Google »
As has been mentioned, Google recently beat down millions of sites because they sold advertising …er… I mean links. Whatever you want to call it, Google doesn’t like it. They only want advertisers to buy links from them (through Adwords) and not spend any advertising dollars with anyone else. So, under the guise of “preserving the unadulterated purity of their search index” they penalized us, along with millions of others site owners, by removing our blog’s PR thereby making us less inviting to potential advertisers.
“I’d like to see them back off the paid links war and instead work out other ways to determine if a link deserves credit, paid or not.”
Danny Sullivan
Search Engine Land
Our Tech Blog was a 5 on its way to a 6 – m’eh, good for us. Personally, I could care less about Google’s PR. So, when our PR was stripped, I barely raised an eyebrow. We made some money from selling advertising on our blog and that was more important to me than PR. And besides, before we placed a link to an advertiser, we personally examined their site to make sure it was related to the theme and content of our site. In fact, we turned down several spammy sites that were obviously just trying to buy a good link from us and we even removed one advertiser who, after we initially approved his ad, changed his link text to say “Check out my PR5 web site” – those wacky spammers. So, yay for us. We were doing our part to fight the spammers! Rest easy, Google. The Index has been defended and remains as pure as freshly fallen snow. Surely Google could see that, right?
But then I started seeing comments about Google de-indexing sites that continued to sell advertising (crap, there I go again… I meant to say “links” instead of advertising, sorry). Posts like that really caught my attention.
In addition, Google said that some sites that are selling links may indeed end up being dropped from its search engine or have penalties attached to prevent them from ranking well.
Are you kidding me? In my opinion, I think that is taking it too far – the “de-indexing” thing (more on why I think that in future posts). Google has argued that selling links (yay, I got it right that time) pollutes its index and that is why the practice is being penalized. But, we didn’t sell links; we sold ads and the ads we sold were only for other web sites directly related to the theme of our blog. These advertisers were interested in putting their ad in front of the eyes of people looking for technology related information.
So why would you penalize us for that? Surely you checked all that and did not just paint everyone with the same brush, right?
Evidently not because I still see lots of sites that display text ads from link brokers that are unrelated to the actual site at all and those sites still have PR. Translation: Google’s system for detecting sites spamming the index is not working. Get a policy in place that actually works before implementing it. And never, ever rely on other webmasters to report to you when they find evidence of a paid link because they could have ulterior motives and might just be trying to cause problems for a competitor.
To sum up, Michael Gray said it best – Hey Google, stop crying about paid links. Their current practice of penalizing and possibly de-indexing sites is worth about as much as a submarine with a screen door.
Improve Google Results »
If you have ever complained because of seeing poor quality web sites listed in Google, be aware that they are hiring actual humans to help improve the SERPs.
For example, you could apply for the currently open position of “Search Quality Evaluator” if you live in Mountain View or want to move there.
“We can’t tell how much this helps Google with its search results. But it is clear that some problems are still better handled by people.”
Saul Hansell
New York Times
Or, you could apply to become a Google Linguist and help analyze the content that Google indexes. Incidentally, the fact that Google is hiring linguists coupled with the fact that they are currently scanning and indexing thousands of college library books (and have been doing so for some time) should really drive home the importance of writing web site content for humans, not robots. That Google is doing this indicates that they are improving the ability of Googlebot to recognize normal human speech and language patterns. Translation: pages that are written for robots will probably soon be dropping in the SERPs. Write for humans.
You could even apply for one of the many temporary positions such as Google Quality Rater.
It is nice to see Google trying to supplement their Search algorithms with some actual human interaction. Too many times, it seems that quality web sites are penalized for some obscure, unclear violation while spammy, made-for-adsense sites flourish.
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