Other sites can hurt your ranking
Google still says that there is almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from their index. What about a site that is not your competitor, but one that you thought was your partner?.
I’ll be using the poorly titled newest addition to the webmaster guidelines ” Why should I report paid links ” as a reference.
The first thing you read about your site being negatively impacted is where they clearly state that buying links is a violation of the webmaster guidelines and can result in penalties.
Buying links in order to improve a site’s ranking is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results
Now this raises an interesting consideration. Assuming Google isn’t in your bank account, they don’t have access to your credit card statements, and they don’t review your tax returns the only way they could divine that you’ve actually purchased a link is to make the conclusion that a site that links to yours has sold that link. Previously we were told that those sites would loose their ability to pass PageRank, but the quoted paragraph above points to a much more proactive penalization of the linkee not the linker.
Further down the page they expound a bit on what Google considers to be the correct way to buy links for traffic purposes only.
Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:
* Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the href tag
* Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file
The interaction of the two paragraphs cited represent a profound change in Google’s earlier stated stance that external sites can’t hurt you (almost).
They have now clearly stated that buying links can harm your site, but if you do buy links that they should be constructed in a way that does not pass PageRank, such as with nofollow or through a redirect. Unfortunately for you, the link buyer, you have no control of how the webmaster you purchased your link from set’s up her website.
Imagine a situation where you’ve done your due diligence an purchased a link for traffic from a site that nofollows all of it’s sold links. Three month’s go by and they decide to change their policy and remove all of the nofollows. Your busy running your own website and don’t have time to police the internet full time and don’t notice that your purchased link is now not not-nofollowed. Google may have already tagged the linking site as a link seller [perhaps due to abundance of nofollow!] and now sees your link that is not properly designated as a paid link and issues a penalty on your site.
We can’t have it both ways, either external sites can or cannot hurt you, or link buying can or cannot hurt you, the two are not independent of each other.
I can forsee a sub-economy building out of this if it truly is the case; purchasing obviously paid links for your competitor on sites that don’t properly designate them as paid. On your site that sells links offer a free one time link to a non-indexed domain. You can prove to your new potential client that your site is deemed a link seller as the new purchased link should not get the new domain indexed. After that charge a set rate to link to your clients competitor, without using nofollow, through javascript, or through a redirect. To expand your business even further you could also add the option of letting the targeted site outbid the competitor to take the link down!
I’m hoping that this is just a case of sabre rattling by Google and the new paid links page has not been thought thoroughly through. As it is written now it’s a complete policy shift from the stance that the link seller will have their ability to pass PageRank stripped. A simple change of the subject in the two paragraphs above from the link buyer to the link seller would also solve this paradox, such as:
BuyingSelling links in order toimprovemanipulate a site’s ranking is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results
and:
Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links
purchasedsold for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:* Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the href tag
* Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file
More discrepancies in the new webmaster guidelines to come soon…
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