JLH Design

In their ever vigilant zeal to be perplexing and clear as mud on the issue Google has many stances on the paid links situation.

Some official:

Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.

Some not so official:

We’ll be concentrating primarily on the sellers, but if you send us a site that appears to be buying links that pass PageRank it’s trivial for us to look up all the backlinks for that site to find potential sellers and work from there.

Whether or not they are “concentrating” on link buyers or not, it appears through many threads on Google Webmasters Help Group that people are actually being penalized for buying links. The ones I’ve seen have been pretty obvious either through sponsored themes, automated link networks, or the most obvious sitewide footer links.

They do offer a method for buying links without getting in Google-hot-water with the much maligned and oft misapplied rel=”nofollow” link or through a robots.txt block:

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 <a> tag
• Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

Which is a all well and good if you are running the site and have control over the links. But what if you are buying the links? What Google is failing to recognize is that sometimes people may actually buy links because they want the traffic. Gasp. It is possible that a permanent link purchased for a set price will in the long run cost less per click than… let’s say… an adwords ad.

I haven’t mentioned the negative SEO aspect yet, as I’m not convinced that it’s really a viable method, but it is often discussed. If Google is penalizing sites that buy links generally the next thought in the room is “Then I’ll just buy my competition a bunch of links and report them!”. First off I’m not 100% convinced they actually penalize the buying sites but rather just discount the links from the sites that sold them, which if the case you are just paying money for clicks to your competition. Not generally a good business practice. Second, I’m not sure they’ll react to all of the reports so you may in fact be buying them some links that will help them in the rankings PLUS the clicks, also not a sustainable plan. Either way there are a fair amount of webmasters out there worrying that someone else can buy links to their site and have it hurt them.

With all this in mind, the desire to buy links (that you cannot control the format of) for traffic and the logical concern that someone else could buy links to your site that may hurt you I propose that Google institutes a “Report My Paid Links” or “Disavow Links” feature in Webmaster Tools.

I envision this tool to allow a webmaster to list domains or pages that have linked to their verified domain that they do not want to count for or against them in ranking. It’s a way for a webmaster to say that they’ve purchased links for traffic in a local directory or perhaps a high profile school newspaper but don’t want to give the impression that those links were purchased for PageRank manipulation. It would have the added benefit of letting a webmaster feel more at ease if they see some spammy links pointing to their site that they may want to disavow. Oh, perhaps the old idea that there is almost nothing a competitor can do to harm you still applies and those links won’t actually hurt you, but it would be a good thing to help put them at ease.

So I say: Google, please let me report paid links! Let me tell you which links I bought for traffic. Let me tell you so that if somebody reports my site as a link buyer you can see that I already told you about them, increasing your trust in me rather than taking the chance that some human reviewer gets it wrong. Let me have those links on record in case the link I bought which was on a nofollow page is changed later by the webmaster without my knowledge.

Then again if you are only going to punish the sellers and not the buyers, then say so, so we can put all this “Google bowling” non-sense behind us.

Google has penalized some sites for buying links and others for selling links. Personal blogs with no revenue stream have their rankings stripped while large brands carry on selling and buying links.

Why?

From the Navy Safety Center:

Start with a cage containing five monkeys. Inside the cage, hang a banana on a string and place a set of stairs under it. Before long, a monkey will go to the stairs and start to climb towards the banana. As soon as he touches the stairs, all of the other monkeys are sprayed with cold water. After a while, another monkey makes an attempt with the same result, and all the other monkeys are sprayed with cold water. Pretty soon the monkeys will try to prevent it.

Now, put away the cold water. Remove one monkey from the cage and replace it with a new one. The new monkey sees the banana and wants to climb the stairs. To his surprise and horror, all the other monkeys attack him. After another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the stairs he will be attacked.

Next, remove another of the original five monkeys and replace it with a new one. The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked. The previous newcomer takes part in the punishment with enthusiasm! Likewise, replace a third original monkey with a new one, then a fourth, then the fifth.

Every time the newest monkey takes to the stairs, he is attacked. Most of the monkeys that are beating him have no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs or why they are participating in the beating of the newest monkey. After replacing all the original monkeys, none of the remaining monkeys have ever been sprayed with cold water. Nevertheless, no monkey ever again approaches the stairs to try for the banana.

Why not? Because as far as they know, that’s the way it’s always been done around there.

They don’t have to punish all the link buyers, not even the big ones, just get enough people talking about it and the rest will follow. If I were looking for monkeys I’d find the most vocal ones perhaps those involved in online forums, social media, and discussion groups. You wouldn’t want to waste your time going after trusted newspapers that sell links for $195 a year, specially when they offer:

Your search engine rankings will also improve by receiving a link on our sites!

While you’ll be less dependent on people having to search for your site, your search engine rankings will be improved for those that do.

“PageRank interprets a link from Page A (our sites) to Page B (your site) as a vote for Page B by Page A. PageRank then assesses a page’s importance by the number of votes it receives. PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value.” – Google Support site

“The best way to ensure that Google finds your site is to have pages on other relevant sites to link to yours.” – Google Support site

~Hat tip to Wingnut for the Monkey Quote, the link seller outing was my own doing.

This just in from DaveN that he has an example and a confirmation from Google that they’ve actually done more than a visible PageRank reduction for a link seller.

It all started when Dave posted about a friend’s site that was no longer showing for it’s money keywords, in his words:

…because I know where they used to rank for t-shirt printing

The assumption was that they’ve done nothing spammy to deserve the penalty.

Matt Cutts stopped by to add:

“what do you do when you know you haven’t do anything wrong, but Google still gives you a penalty”

e-examine your assumptions? E.g. http://web.archive.org/web/20070817163057/http://www.indigoclothing.com/blog/ is a link that shows when they were selling links. Later versions of their site were selling even more links, e.g. “sexy underwear” links.

Google has been very clear about how we feel about selling/buying links. If indigoclothing.com has dropped their text link ads and remove the links that they sold, they could do a reconsideration request. According to the data I looked at, the site has never done a reconsideration request.

So now we can get on with the business of actually earning links now that Google is actually going to start reducing the rankings of sites selling links. The visible PageRank reduction caused quite a stir, but in the end all I kept reading about it was that peoples rankings and traffic didn’t change. Sort of a non-penalty.

A quick check of the web’s most notorious link seller shows them still indexed and still ranking. Google must be going after the small time TLA sites first before tackling the worst offenders. Google still recommends buying links from Yahoo! in their guidelines, but those are slow to update as the help for the Reconsideration Request still says it’s for deindexed sites:

If your site is not included in Google’s search results, and you believe that it does not violate our webmaster guidelines, you can ask Google to reconsider your site for inclusion in the index.

This is clearly not the case as shown by this very example.

I’m no stranger to Google’s reconsideration request. I’ve helped dozens if not hundreds of people scour their sites, identify possible violations, implement changes, and compose the reconsideration request. I don’t do this as a professional cause but as an extension of my efforts in helping webmasters in Google’s Webmaster Help Group. Perhaps its because I choose the sites I want to work with and only cater to the ones that I believe are acting in ignorance rather than more devious intentions, but my success rate is quite high. There’s never been a case I couldn’t solve, then again this is probably due to my selective choices and not my mad Google skills. Either way, I know of what I speak.

Which brings me to an interesting situation that I was alerted of in twitter, saw in Sphinn, and then saw unfold on Dazzlin Donna’s take on SEO news, tips and theories SEO Scoop Blog. If you take the time to read Donna’s post you’ll see that she was caught up in the paid links dragnet and lost some of her visible PageRank. After a while she decided to demonetize her blog and set it up to comply with Google’s guidelines regarding paid links. She’s not Yahoo! so her time and opinion in choosing which sites to review are not worthy of being compensated for if they contain an active link (Google’s opinion, not mine).  After cleaning up the site she submitted a reconsideration request to Google.  Time passed and yet her PageRank penalty persisted.  Five weeks passed and she has finally found some resolution, though not through Google’s reconsideration request, but through the only solution that will actually work.

From my outsiders point of view and without any inside knowledge, the situation unfolded like this.

1. Sometime in late December a reconsideration request was filed.
2. Five weeks passed…
3. Donna posts her plight to her blog
4. A twitter is sent out.
5. The post is Sphunn.
6. 20 people sphunn it.
7. The Sphinn goes hot 2 hours later.
8. Matt Cutts comments on her blog, scolding her for her non-scalable method of approaching the situation, but offers to help.
9. Matt offers to look into another commenter’s site.
10. Matt says that her disclosure policy could be the problem.
11. Donna changes her policy and responds that she did so.
12. Matt emails the Google employee charged with reviewing Donna’s request.  Apparently there is another post that is still passing PageRank that was paid for.
13. Donna fixes the post and comments that she did so.
14. Matt points out another violation.
15. Donna fixes that violation.
16. Matt praises his team and says that they will get to it soon.

I would not have thought of how obtuse this whole process was had it not been for Matt saying, “In general you want to go with the reconsideration request approach rather than invoking me (that’s not scalable :)”  [my emphasis] Obviously this process is not scalable at all.  Here we have someone who’s worked on fixing her site, made some substantial changes, submitted a request for review, and apparently missed some things.  What she missed was exactly the same problem that she already admitted guilt to in the reconsideration request, but rather than offering any help Google files the request in the circular file and ignores the problem.

Since the majority of site owners don’t know Matt Cutts, know how to use social sites to get attention to their blog, don’t have blogs for that matter, and if they did probably wouldn’t get Matt to write six comments on their blog and send an email on their behalf, this is not a scalable solution.

A scalable solution would be the following:

1. Site owner fixes site and submits a reconsideration request.
2. Google reviews the site and finds some outstanding violations.
3. Google sends a message back in the site owners  webmaster’s tools message center saying, “We have received and reviewed your request for consideration.  Unfortunately at this time we are unable to act on your request due to continued possible violations of our Webmaster Guidelines.  Please feel free to review the Webmaster’s Guidelines, make any changes that you find appropriate and resubmit your reconsideration request”
4. Site owner digs deeper and sends in request.
5. Google responds with another note, “We have received and reviewed your request for consideration.  It appears that your site is now within our guidelines.”

Notice that I didn’t even say that Google had to specifically say what violation they had.  I didn’t even specify whether or not a penalty has ever existed or has been lifted.  What I did do is “COMMUNICATE“.   Letting the site owner at least know that they are being heard.  Google’s response can be an automated one with only two possibilities. I’m sure their is a radio button somewhere on a computer somewhere that a Google employee is clicking when they review a reconsideration request.  It wouldn’t be too much to program one of two auto-responses depending on the status of that button.  That would be a scalable solution.

Their communication efforts in the help groups and their webmasters blog have been quite admirable lately, but there still is a disjoint between your average webmasters and those who know how to get to Matt Cutts, and that is just not right.  Not right at all.  I’ve heard many people say and write that one thing you should look for on an SEO’s resume is whether or not they know any search engine engineers, this situation just adds  that, and that is just not right.  Not right at all.

Having Matt Cutts be the voice of Google out there writing on his own blog,  commenting on people’s sites, and occasionally penning something on the official webmaster’s blog is great and wonderful for the community that watches that sort of thing.  I just believe that those people are a small subset of the actual webmaster population and the majority should not be at a disadvantage because they don’t subscribe to the right feeds.

Earlier tonight I left a comment on Sphinn, “This is all becoming borderline Sisyphean,” regarding the debate that has permeated the SEO crowd.  I’ve looked for uproar beyond the professional search engine manipulation machine and just cannot find any.  Anyway I find the whole fiasco quite humorous to witness.  I have opinions on the matter, but none that are going to make a difference.

Avoiding the obvious wiki reference I found this definition to help clarify my position:

Of or relating to an endless and ineffective task.
This one comes straight out of Greek myth. Sisyphus was a king of Corinth, a son of Aeolus (the ruler of the winds, hence our word aeolian for something produced by or borne on the wind). In later legend he was the father of Odysseus or Ulysses. His name actually meant “crafty” in Greek: he was noted for his deception and he’s the equivalent in Greek folklore of the master trickster who turns up in many folk beliefs, such as Coyote in American Indian mythology. He even managed to cheat Death the first time around, surviving the experience to live to a ripe old age. In Greek legend Sisyphus was punished in Hades for his misdeeds in life by being condemned eternally to roll a heavy stone up a hill. As he neared the top, the stone rolled down again, so that his labor was everlasting and futile. The word first appeared in English in the middle of the seventeenth century. It isn’t used much these days because so few people understand the reference to classical literature.

The parallels that one can draw from that story are uncanny.  It also answers the question, beyond the obvious “not to help the spammers angle” why Google doesn’t notify everyone of their penalties, their cause, their existence, nor their cure.  The announcements of paid links have accomplished the same task, paralyzing the community in an endless and ineffective task of one-sided debate.

In what many are calling just a warning volley across the bow of many link-selling sites Google has initiated a penalty of sorts by reducing some sites’ visual PageRank score, one such site is Search Engine Roundtable which provides us proof that their rankings and traffic have not been affected.

Clearly a reduction in PageRank for a site selling links is a signal that Google feels that they are breaking the rules as written in the webmaster guidelines. Regarding link selling they state,

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 <a> tag
• Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

Which is a practice that Search Engine Roundtable is not ready to take part in as made evident by Barry Schwartz (rustybrick) in the above linked article,

On a personal note, I trust my sponsors, I value their sponsorships and I couldn’t do what I do without their financial support. Some sponsors can’t afford huge sponsorships, so they sponsor in their ways. It is what enables this site and many other sites to function and operate on a daily basis. I turn down sponsors all the time because they are simply not relevant or useful to my reader. I hand select them and for them to be on my site, means I trust them. Why nofollow someone you trust and want to thank? Is that a slap in their face? Will I have to and will they continue to sponsor? Time will tell.

So we have a site that outwardly sells links, does not want to conform to the webmaster guidelines by marking paid links in the manner in which Google desires, and has been hit with a PageRank reduction. Clearly a signal that the site could be considered not only a rule breaker but a bad neighborhood to be associated with.

In Google’s webmaster’s guidelines it clearly states,

In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

I’ve written before on the difficulties of discerning (complete with Matt Cutts’ email address!) what a bad neighborhood is even asked for clarification on the matter.

I find it quite ironic then that Google’s very own official blog links to said site which has admittedly broken the rules and publicly been admonished. ( screen shot ) Are they not taking their own advice and linking to a bad neighborhood? This is not the first time Google has talked out of both sides of their mouth. Even during this last wave of anti-link-selling assaults the largest link seller in the land has gotten off scot-free with out any sort of PageRank deduction. Matt Cutts has even come out and said that they are allowed to sell links because they review the links before they publish them and not every one makes it into the directory. If that is the standard to be followed perhaps Barry Schwartz and others like him to accept advertising dollars should just charge for the chance of being listed on his site, add an element of uncertainty to the equation. Maybe then he will get his PageRank back while making more money as he could oversell the advertisements 10 fold. To me that seems highly unethical but for some reason is the only method of linking endorsed by Google without the use of machine only readable declaration of a paid link.

If reducing one’s PageRank for selling links is really a penalty, I would expect Google to do the right thing for their own blogs ranking and not link to such terribly bad neighborhoods (t.i.c.) and will be watching the site as an indicator.

Before anyone get’s upset at me, I’m not calling Barry Schwartz a spammer or even personally think he did anything wrong. The PageRank degrading has been widely published and I am just drawing the connection between what Google says and what they do. I follow Barry on Twitter, his own Cartoon Barry, Search Engine Roundtable, and his contributions on Search Engine Land. He is considered a leader in the industry sector and I value his opinions and expertise.  There’s at least 4 links in this article to his properties that are genuine followed editorial links of endorsement, not like the link to the Yahoo! directory which is nofollowed due to their blatant breaking of the rules.

THIS IS AN EMERGENCY SEO/WEBMASTER BROADCAST.

Due to Google’s apparent assault on Paid Links resulting in some sites’ PageRank being reduced, Digital Point forum members will have to be guarded 24 hours a day for the foreseeable future. If you are near one please remove their belt, shoelaces, and anything that could be fashioned into a sharp weapon. They should also be moved to the lowest floor in the building and all windows should be boarded up.

This is not a drill. I repeat. This is not a drill.

Google has always been smart in respect to building solutions based on scalability. From the onset they always wondered what would happen if they had to grow the solution at hand by 10 fold or even greater. Scalability in their algorithm is so entrenched as its philosophy that they even openly admit that sites that are submitted via a spam report are not removed or penalized. They rather use that data as information to judge their algorithm against.

What amazes me regarding their battle with paid links how non-scalable the solution is:

• Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the <a> tag
• Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file
• [it used to say something about javascript but they took that out]

They even take it a step further, which is obviously also a step back in their fight against spam, when they ask for people to submit sites that sell links, supposedly for some hand-to-hand combat.

So what’s a more scalable solution, Google tweaking it’s system to identify paid links on its own or having millions and millions of webmaster’s modify their billions and billions of pages available on the web? Obviously its much easier for Google if we all just bend over and do their job for them, but then again how serious are they about this? Sure it’s available in the guidelines, at conferences, and if you read Matt Cutts blog, but that probably reaches a very small percentage of the real content creators out there. All the pros will know about it, but the VAST majority of indexed content managers out there are going to miss the message.

Let’s go back for a second to review why they think Paid Links are bad. What set Google apart from the rest of “search engines” at the time was that they not only looked at the content on the page but also used the academic model of references in literature to vouch for the authority a page is on the subject. At the time of that original theory the web was young and innocent and pretty much not exploited nearly as much. So Google’s rankings are based largely on the links to a page/site and since most people want to rank higher so they get more traffic the obvious optimization procedure is to get more links. Had they ranked sites based on the use of purple text all websites would be using purple text today.

Back when the original ideas for Google came about most of the links out there were actually votes for other sites. It was when “surfing” the web actually meant bouncing around from site to site based on the links of those sites. You didn’t Google something you surfed for it. In 1584 when Google came up with this idea the barriers to get online were much higher than they are now from registration and hosting to easy content generation it’s gotten much easier to get your site online today, back then it was more academic institutions, geek squads, and corporations that had the resources to publish sites.

Well the times they are a changing. Now you can buy a domain for pennies, hosting is next to free, and writing content has never been easier. There are so many millions of new links created every day that they have lost their value due to the sheer volume of links available. HOWEVER, there are some sites that have some value, traffic, authority, PageRank, and links from those sites tend to be worth something, and BOOM an economy of link selling is born.

Not straying too far from their original founders who borrowed the reference system used in academic papers as a judge of quality, Google wants to borrow from the older established media sources that must disclose paid endorsements. What’s different however is that most of those media outlets are regulated by authorities. Being that Google is the only game in town when it comes to actual search traffic they are the defacto authority to regulate the masses.

So how can Google get everyone on board, let me repeat that EVERYONE, not just the 0.0001% of the publishers that read Matt’s blog, or the 10,000 subscribers to seoMOZ, but EVERYONE. If Google wants to regulate the web then they need to start regulating it and not just observing it, its going to be painful but if they really want to monitor all the links on the web it will have to be done.

1. The first thing to do is throw out all of the links known till this point. They are polluted, we have no way of knowing the intention of any of the links since they exist pre-regulation.
2. In order to have the links count they have to be registered, verified, and monitored by Google so all websites will have to be removed from the index.
3. After verifying ownership in your webmaster tools account, Google will crawl the site. They can then show you a list of all the external links on your site. You then select what type a link it is: Regular Voting link, Paid Link, non-endorsed user generated link, etc. After selecting the link attribute you will have to digitally sign an agreement attesting to the authenticity of your claim, enter the captcha, and submit. Repeat for the rest of the links on your site.
4. After the links are verified and attested to Google can then add them in as votes or non-votes into the index.

Now we’ve got something with some teeth in it. In order to be included in Google’s index you have to have agreed to their terms and have signed a legally binding contract that they can go back on.

• We no longer have to worry about hidden links as they won’t be verified.
• Links will only be bought and sold for traffic.
• You can code your links any way you’d like.
• User submitted link directories are all but dead.
• Sitewide links will probably disappear due to the sheer labor required to insert them.
• Sneaky little plug-in and theme developers that drop links all over the place will be wasting their time as the site owners probably won’t vouch for them.
• Automatic text link building systems will grind to a halt as whenever the links change on a page the page will drop out of the index waiting to be verified.
• As the publisher has to be verified by state issued credentials, large false link networks built up by SEO’s will have little value as Google will be able to see all of them as owned by the same person.
• Comment spamming will disappear as people will just turn off their comments.

Now until that is instituted and since you’ve read to the end of this story and know about Google’s stance on paid link you are morally bound to nofollow all of your paid links and only buy nofollowed links. Granted your competitors who didn’t go to SES San Jose or read Matt Cutts blog probably aren’t doing that, but that’s your problem not Google’s.

The only flaw in the system is that some people may actually LIE and say that a link that they got paid for is actually a regular link. Oh my. Well at least that’s a sin of ccommission and not a sin of omission like the millions of people currently not nofollowing their paid links.

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:

Buying Selling links in order to improve manipulate 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 purchased sold 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…

I’ll pay to link to you, or you can pay me not to.

Google’s position on Paid Linking is clear, they do not like it, unless they are declared paid, both per Google’s recommendations and perhaps someday the FCC. It makes the linking structure of the web unnatural and deceives the search engines. In essence, someone with enough money could buy themselves to the top of the rankings by buying enough links. It’s contrary to the democratic nature of the PageRank system of Google.

I however still hold my editorial discretion and will even pay for the right to link to whom I want to.

With all of that in mind, I intend to extend this offer that comes with two options:

INTRODUCING THE JLH PAID REVIEW

I will review your website’s content and blog about it, and any subsequent pages you specify without any link per the following understanding:

1. You must first submit your website for a free pre-review, where I will editorial choose which sites I will review.
2. If I accept your offer for a review, the review is by my design, be that positive (mostly) or negative (rarely), and you agree to that before payment.
3. The review will carry a human readable status of “This is a sponsored review“
4. The fees for this service are $ 250.00 for the main site home page, and $ 75.00 for each additional page.

Optionally

1. If you so choose, I will add a link to each page on your site reviewed within the review which will have rel=”nofollow” added to them. If this option is chosen I will then pay you $ 25.00 per link that is added and nofollowed (limit 1 per page of your site reviewed). The human readable status will read, “This is a sponsored review. I have also paid for the right to link to the site using nofollow”
2. You may also choose to allow me to link to your site’s pages without the nofollow attribute. As payment for this opportunity I will then pay you $ 50.00 for each link supplied (limit 1 per page of your site reviewed). The human readable status will read, “This is a sponsored review. I have also paid for the right to link to the site”

All reviews can take up to a week to process and will remain on the site for at least 1 year, if the site is taken down for any reason you will be refunded on a pro-rated basis from the day of posting to the demise of the site.