Paid links are against the Google webmaster guidelines. Get used to it.
No matter how eloquently you moan about about it, you are still moaning. Get over it. I recommend (as I have for a long time) that you read the Google webmaster guidelines and understand them. Many things that you do every day are violating them, so you will, at some point see consequences from it.
I have more bad news that strategically is important to anyone wanting to have a presence on Google…
SEO is also against the Google webmaster guidelines. Our industry is based on something that Google does not want. Let’s go to the guidelines…
“Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings.”
Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding.
The goal of SEO is to improve a websites ranking using tricks (or as we call them “methods”). SEO is against the guidelines. Period.
Do not complain about it. Here is your scenario, you gamed the system but now you are able to game it less.
Hey, you know how everyones page rank is going down?
Is it really? Or is the new lower page rank just reflective of what it actually would be if the SEO savvy had never gamed it? I remember someone at Google (I can’t remember or find the actual statement, if anyone knows it, let me know so I can link to it) who was discussing the way people complained about not regaining their original ranking after submitting a reinclusion request.
Now listen to this, what they said was brilliant and very very important for some of you to hear. Here is the chain of events that lead to Google’s response…
1) Site was not following the guidelines, but ranked at #1 for a certain term
2) Google penalized it, and it no longer ranked anywhere for that term
3) Site entered a reinclusion request to Google.
4) Google read the request and removed the penalty.
5) Site ranked at #20 where it used to rank #1
6) Site owner complained about it, say “Hey I did the reinlusion request and you removed the penalty, why aren’t I number 1 again?”
7) Google responded…
(this is the important part)
They explained that yes, the penalty was removed, and that the reason the site did not go back to ranking at #1 was not due in any way to a penalty. It was due to the fact that #20 was where they naturally ranked when the manipulative factors were removed from the website. They were not being punished, they were just ranking where they actually should be ranking at.
If I screwed that up, I will try to make it simpler.
When you do shit to a website to make it rank better, any of the shit you do (and the effects of said shit) can be removed by Google. This is not a penalty, it is just ranking you at the place you should rank at.
My thoughts on the PageRank thingie going on:
I think there are many sites that we are all scratching our heads over, great quality sites that have lost some major page rank, but there are some similarities amongst most of the websites that lost page rank this week. This is just observation.
What is similar?
Revenue models, advertising, and use of known SEO tactics.
Yup, thats about it.
Now I am not heartless. I can see just like the rest of you do, that some of these sites are quality, wonderful websites that Google should just go to bed with a goofy smile on it’s face knowing that such sites are in their index.
SERoundtable???
It is stupid ridiculous dumb that they should suffer such a thing. There is not a more quality site out there.
That being said, I do not know what they have done, if anything, that would be, dare I say… SEOish.
SEO really is against the guidelines, and as I illustrated using Bloom County characters, Google has in the past, and will very likely continue to get better at identifying sites that are not following it’s guidelines.
This scares the crap out of us. It should, if your websites rank is falsely inflated due to SEO techniques.
The Google webmaster guidelines are neato. Check them out.
“The goal of SEO is to improve a websites ranking using tricks (or as we call them “methods”). SEO is against the guidelines. Period. ”
Well, no, not Period…
I would say that yes, a lot of what SEOs ‘do’ is against the quality guidelines when pushing for rankings (so I get your point, I think), but there is a whole hell of a lot that isn’t, and still ‘accomplishes’ SEO.
We’re working on a contract for a major job site in Canada right now – they’re going through a redesign and someone suggested they bring an SEO consultant in at a fairly early stage. They had already done their wireframes and had the vision of their new site… these guys have more PR juice than a pickle in Larry P’s lunch.
The new site would have an index page, and a search results page. c’est tout. These people should rank well for ‘jobs in toronto’ ‘jobs in vancouver’ and a whole hell of a lot more, but since they don’t provide any static URL associated with these topics (regardless of the fact that they have the best content for these topics), google will not rank them…. why? because they’re not categorizing properly and presenting those categorizations to search engine spiders as unique, consistent content.
The ‘SEO’ job in this case is simply ensuring that when someone searches for ‘marketing jobs in toronto’ they are directed to a page (something approaching a static URI) about marketing jobs, and some indicator (internal linking structure?) that indicates it is a subsection of the toronto jobs topic… without screwing up their server headers and without letting their db URIs get too crappy.
Is helping people properly categorize their content, and teaching them that google wants to see this content presented with some consistency, a trick? I don’t think so.
I think the whole reason google publishes ‘webmaster guidlines’ (boy I’m using a lot of single quotes today) is so that people can do ‘SEO’ without trickery.
Excellent point, and I agree with you. And following the webmaster guidelines according to Google employees is called SEM (really, if any Google employee is heard uttering the phrase SEO in the GooglePlex they receive a friendly (30 second electric shock) reminder that the better term is SEM)
But all joking aside, I totally agree that SEO is increasingly guidelineish, and people and companies definately need the help