Google trying to penalise paid links
23/04/2007
Google trying to penalise paid links
Google is now actively encouraging webmasters to report ‘paid links’ so it can test a new part of its algorithm to give less weight to these paid links. This can be done from the Google webmaster’s console via a spam report form.
So what are paid links?
Or rather what does Google think of a bad paid link? The answer according to Google is: Bad links are “paid links that flow PageRank and attempt to game Google’s rankings.”
Often this is obvious, when ads for certain products or services appear in small text boxes around the page and have little relevance to the main page content.
But what about ‘sponsored listings’ or ‘sponsored ads’ or ‘banner advertising’. This is where the distinction becomes harder, both for real people to tell, but also for robots to tell.
Cornish WebServices think that some ‘legitimate’ forms of web advertising – such as banner ads with links could be adversely hit in the near future by revised search engine algorithms which attempt to deal with the paid link problem.
When considering a search engine marketing strategy, businesses need to anticipate likely changes in search engines to keep ahead of competitors. Cornish WebServices provide a Search engine consultancy service to businesses as well as providing full search engine optimisation services.
