Google hints at banning sites that buy links for SE rankings
 

I was reading this article about the new search engine that CBS owns called Mahalo.com. All of the search result pages are hand made by a person. Well Matt Cutts, Google's Search Quality Engineer, was talking about the level of human interaction at Google, and then I saw this:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/infoworld/20...nfoworld/89077

wont ever happend

Pure BS.

thats interesting!

It is an interesting threat, but the reality is that Google has steadfastly refused to do any human checking of links or SERPs, and they aren't going to suddenly hire thousands of people to deal with bogus complaints.

Google is "this close" to having totally irrelevant results in many of the major SERPs, putting them closer to losing their number one standing. They have way bigger issues to deal with than a few paid links.

Interesting article, but it does not seem realistic for the moment

Even if it does happen, it's going to be hard as hell for them to tell if you bought a link

Google puts out so many false alarms, they must have graduated from the George W. Bush school of fear-mongering.

Simply put: It can't work.
Why not?

Scenario: I rank #2 for a hugely competitive keyword and similarly for a bunch of related words. I go and buy a text link for the #1 site from any of the hundreds of know paid link sites. I report it to Google. They get banned/penalized.

Is it worth it to buy a $5, $15, $50 link in hopes of getting my competitor penalized? Of course, if the result is I get top spot and thousands of extra visitors per day.

old drama, was a bunch of shit talking a few weeks ago when Matt brought that up on his blog...

They could easily incorporate the number of complaints in the matrix determining the dominant eigenvalues so that it impacts someone's pagerank without the need of hiring a single additional staffer.

I imagine they could do that for any number of wiki-type inputs.

In most cases there'd be no way to prove the links were bought.

Such as with ours.

They don't have to prove anything. All they need to do is suspect a site enough to dump it. It's their rules and it's not democratic.

"TrustRank" was a concept introduced to balance between algo and human qualification of links.

LinkStoppers for Google - that would be a hoot.

I wonder what the registrar spoofers are thinking now?

Did you invest in multiple class-C's to fake up your rankings. Hope they don't start compiling a list of known Class C's used for page rank manipulation.

Did you really think they would stop at link farms?

I guess that means everyone buying links through Adwords is gonna be banned.

don't see how it could be true, but i would welcome it... true and not 'purchased' relevance in search results would be a welcome thing to me..

Does anyone actually net in black with adwords? How close are the margins?

Some of the SEO forums do talk about adwords links being valued differently.

:winkwink::thumbsup