Archive for 'off page seo'
Matt Cutts Says You Can Buy Links
But he’ll boil your pet rabbit if you do. Just kidding. Matt Cutts and Google do not want to stop you buying links to your site. But if you do buy links, he doesn’t want them corrupting Google’s search results and Google will endeavour to discount such links. Voluntarily given links based on the merit of the site being linked to are like votes that say “hey, this site is really something”. Looking at “natural” links to a web page is a good way of assessing a that page. However, in terms of search engine rankings, buying links is like buying votes. It’s no longer a biased opinion on how good that site is. For this reason Google does not want to count bought links its ranking algorithm.
The ideal is that Google handle bought links algorithmically. Then Google staff can sit back with their ovaltines and trust that the Google machine will identify and discount bought links automatically. However, it’s sometimes (often?) difficult to identify links which have been bought, especially if they have been embedded in content to look natural. Hence the willingness on Google’s part to accept a heads up from good internet citizens who happen to spot these evil links.
Schoolkid SEO Hysteria
Given the usual schoolkid SEO hysteria that Google’s stance is met with, you can understand MC stressing at every opportunity that Google don’t mind you buying links. They want you to go ahead and knock yourself out buying links. They just don’t want them spoiling their SERPs. In Matt’s words, you can do what you want with your site and Google can do what they want with their index.
Although not mentioned in this short video, you can get the linker to add the “nofollow” to the rel attribute on the link. This signals to Google that the link has been bought, and your rabbit is spared.
