The Clever Geek

After a few of the customers I deal with regularly dropped from the top of Google into the dark
abyss of the internet in October, I started looking into what changed. Eventually, I found that they were at the top of Yahoo and MSN bringing me to the conclusion that it wasn’t a problem with the site but rather in an update to Google’s special sauce. Many people in the community suspect that people whose SEO plan includes paid links are being singled out by Google and having their precious PR stripped from them. Though I think that it’s in everyone’s best interest that search engines don’t give positive rankings for paid links, I think that giving negative consideration is a bad thing. Discrediting all paid looks should definitely take priority over discrediting the site the links point to.

As Google says here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291
Avoid SEOs that talk about the power of “free-for-all” links, link popularity schemes, or submitting your site to thousands of search engines. These are typically useless exercises that don’t affect your ranking in the results of the major search engines — at least, not in a way you would likely consider to be positive.

If you interpret the above to mean that you will be penalized for paid links, isn’t that allowing anyone on the internet to damage your reputation? If I were a fan of black hat SEO and were third on Google for my keyword, could I not simply pay some
link directories to link to the two sites above me thousands of times then bask in the
glory of being number one?

See also:
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/014984.html

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