RE: Google's recent clamp down on paid links

On 10:20:59 13 November 2007 Ashley wrote:

 

Google don't typically answer these kinds of questions very explicitly. They say (and you can understand their point) that they can't because that would then just make clear to the bad guys what they can get away with, or how to cheat the system.

There are lots of grey areas here. For example, if you did a link swap, or some kind of contra deal (look at the links in the footer of our site for example) then are these 'paid links'? They are in as much as both parties understand that there is value in them. I guess, though, the point is that the value should be understood as brand value + direct traffic and not about conferring page rank and therefore should have "nofollow" on them. (although I would still argue this point - we should have the editorial right to choose that we DO want to confer page rank and for good reason).

The bigger question that this raises for me is around whether Google (and indeed other search engines) should have to have some kind of SLA (service level agreement) whereby they had a clearly described process (with associated contacts, timings etc.) for resolving issues or problems?

I talked about this last year in the context of delistings and re-indexation (see What re-indexing processes should / must Google offer?) but I don't think that anything has changed. In the instance we're talking about then I think it is understandable that Google might make mistakes in punishing these 'paid links' inappropriately or, indeed, that a site owner might make a genuine mistake. However, at the moment, I'm not aware that there is any clear way of resolving such possible issues?

As mentioned in my earlier post, I think it is fair enough that Google could charge for such issue resolution services, but I do think it at least needs to offer them.

In the meantime we can all scrabble to do what we hope and believe is the right thing and pray that we don't get accidentally crushed by the juggernaut that is the Big G...

Ashley Friedlein
CEO
E-consultancy.com