5 ms·

Are there any provisions to this policy to ensure that it's not abused? It would be trivially easy to create "sponsored" links on behalf of your competitor in

• theseanstewart 15y ago
  Great point. I'm about to pay some bloggers to link to google.com and have them add "This post was sponsored by Google". Think they'll ban themselves?
• byrneseyeview 15y ago
  This comes up as a hypothetical risk whenever stories like this break, but I know of no cases where it happens. That includes situations where individual link-buyers and link-buying sites have been publicly outed by commentators or competitors. The economics of this only work out well if you have high marketshare (if you're 5% of the market, and you blow up a competitor, 95% of the benefit accrues to the other 95% of the market). So I think this threat is overblown. Every time it comes up, I've asked for examples--if you hear of any after the fact, I would greatly appreciate it if you'd get in touch. Email's in the profile.
  • uriah 15y ago
    Isn't the relevant "market" searches for whatever keyword group you are considering? The marketshare of clicks is mainly divided among the 10 sites on the front page. I imagine the benefit, when shared among only 1-9 sites, could be significant. Also consider the benefit of moving from ranking 11 to 10 or from 2 to 1, for example. Though I can't speak for the efficacy of this technique, this fairly old article suggests submitting competitors articles to directories to reduce their perceived (by search engines) quality: http://www.bluehatseo.com/open-questions-when-to-never-do-article-submissions http://www.bluehatseo.com/open-questions-when-to-never-do-ar...