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This whole thing seems bizarre. Pagerank smells broken to me. You can't buy links, but you can if you do it from us. What a scam. If pagerank can't differenti

by lugg 12y ago

This whole thing seems bizarre. Pagerank smells broken to me. You can't buy links, but you can if you do it from us. What a scam. If pagerank can't differentiate "blackhat" seo links from organic links it probably needs fixing. In regards to this article its a bit strange. Reading the email its pretty obvious how it went down: Company hires dodgy seo company who sets up a bunch of links Google detects it, sends out warning listing all links to their site Company mass emails every site owner with links pointing back at them I don't think they were really asking the links to be removed from the authors site at all, it was aimed at someone completely different. All they had to go by was the referrer and the link.

jonknee 12y ago
> You can't buy links, but you can if you do it from us. What a scam. You seem to be confusing how Google's advertising work. You can't buy a page rank passing link from Google. Adwords and Adsense ads do not pass PageRank. No legitimate advertising does (for starters because they all want to track visits and send you through redirects, but also because it's usually injected remotely and not part of the page that can send PageRank).
- lugg 12y ago
  But that is my point what counts as legitimate advertising? Who decides whether a link is non passing advertising or not. Google is the gatekeeper here. They get to decide what links are "advertising" and what are naughty naughty black hat so. Are you saying that if the seo guys labeled their spam links as advertising it would be legit and google would just ignore the links? Now they are telling you how you should advertise as wellas which adworks are allowed to sell you links. Want to try some viral marketing where you dont tell the user it was advertising - just brand awareness and a link back? Oops no that's trying to mess with Page rank were going to flag your site. Its ludicrous. Look I know they're not out to hit the good guys and the spammy tactics of bh seo peeps is gross as hell but I dont think you can really draw a definite line here without collateral damage being inflicted which is what I think this article was trying to point out.
  - jonknee 12y ago
    nofollow makes it extraordinarily easy to stay out of trouble with any type of advertising you can think of. If your SEO guys used nofollow on their spam links it would not matter if they were paid for links or not (they wouldn't have a positive SEO effect though and would be a waste).

by lugg 12y ago

jonknee 12y ago

> You can't buy links, but you can if you do it from us. What a scam. You seem to be confusing how Google's advertising work. You can't buy a page rank passing link from Google. Adwords and Adsense ads do not pass PageRank. No legitimate advertising does (for starters because they all want to track visits and send you through redirects, but also because it's usually injected remotely and not part of the page that can send PageRank).

lugg 12y ago
But that is my point what counts as legitimate advertising? Who decides whether a link is non passing advertising or not. Google is the gatekeeper here. They get to decide what links are "advertising" and what are naughty naughty black hat so. Are you saying that if the seo guys labeled their spam links as advertising it would be legit and google would just ignore the links? Now they are telling you how you should advertise as wellas which adworks are allowed to sell you links. Want to try some viral marketing where you dont tell the user it was advertising - just brand awareness and a link back? Oops no that's trying to mess with Page rank were going to flag your site. Its ludicrous. Look I know they're not out to hit the good guys and the spammy tactics of bh seo peeps is gross as hell but I dont think you can really draw a definite line here without collateral damage being inflicted which is what I think this article was trying to point out.
- jonknee 12y ago
  nofollow makes it extraordinarily easy to stay out of trouble with any type of advertising you can think of. If your SEO guys used nofollow on their spam links it would not matter if they were paid for links or not (they wouldn't have a positive SEO effect though and would be a waste).