Information about buying and selling links that pass PageRank

Saturday, December 01, 2007

Our goal is to provide users the best search experience by presenting equitable and accurate
results. We enjoy working with webmasters, and an added benefit of our working together is that
when you make better and more accessible content, the internet, as well as our index, improves.
This in turn allows us to deliver more relevant search results to users.

If, however, a webmaster chooses to buy or sell links for the purpose of manipulating search
engine rankings, we reserve the right to protect the quality of our index. Buying or selling links
that pass PageRank violates our
webmaster guidelines.
Such links can hurt relevance by causing:

• Inaccuracies: False popularity and links that are not fundamentally based on merit, relevance,
  or authority
• Inequities: Unfair advantage in our organic search results to websites with the biggest
  pocketbooks

In order to stay within Google’s quality guidelines, paid links should be disclosed through a
nofollow ou
other techniques
such as doing a redirect through a page which is robots.txt’ed out. Here’s more information
explaining our stance on buying and selling links that pass PageRank:

February 2003: Google’s official
quality guidelines
have advised “Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or
PageRank” for several years.

September 2005: I posted on my blog about
text links and PageRank.

December 2005: Another
post on my blog
discussed this issue, and said

Many people who work on ranking at search engines think that selling links can lower the quality
of links on the web. If you want to buy or sell a link purely for visitors or traffic and not for
search engines, a simple method exists to do so (the nofollow attribute). Google’s stance on
selling links is pretty clear and we’re pretty accurate at spotting them, both algorithmically and
manually. Sites that sell links can lose their trust in search engines.

September 2006: In an
interview with John Battelle,
I noted that “Google does consider it a violation of our quality guidelines to sell links that
affect search engines.”

January 2007: I posted on my blog to remind people that
“links in those paid-for posts should be made in a way that doesn’t affect search engines.”

April 2007: We provided a mechanism for people to
report paid links to Google.

June 2007: I addressed paid links in my keynote discussion during the Search Marketing Expo (SMX)
conference in Seattle. Here’s a
video excerpt from the keynote discussion.
It’s less than a minute long, but highlights that Google is willing to use both algorithmic
and manual detection of paid links that violate our quality guidelines, and that we are willing
to take stronger action on such links in the future.

June 2007: A post on the official Google Webmaster Blog noted that
“Buying or selling links to manipulate results and deceive search engines violates our guidelines.”
The post also introduced a new official form in Google’s webmaster console so that people could
report buying or selling of links.

June 2007: Google added more specific guidance to our official webmaster documentation about how
to report buying or selling links
and what sort of link schemes
violate our quality guidelines.

August 2007: I described Google’s official position on buying and selling links in a
panel dedicated to paid links
at the Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference in San Jose.

September 2007: In a
post on my blog
recapping the SES San Jose conference, I also made my
presentation available to the general public
(PowerPoint link).

October 2007: Google provided comments for a Forbes article titled
“Google Purges the Payola”.

October 2007: Google officially confirmed to Search Engine Land that we were taking stronger
action on this issue, including
decreasing the toolbar PageRank of sites selling links that pass PageRank.

October 2007: An email that I sent to Search Engine Journal also made it clear that Google was
taking stronger action on
buying/selling links that pass PageRank.

We appreciate the feedback that we’ve received on this issue. A few of the more prevalent
questions:

Is buying or selling links that pass PageRank a violation of Google’s guidelines? Why? Yes,
it is, for the reasons we mentioned above. I also recently did a post on my personal blog that
walks through an example
of why search engines wouldn’t want to count such links. On a serious medical subject (brain
tumors), we highlighted people being paid to write about a brain tumor treatment when they hadn’t
been aware of the treatment before, and we saw several cases where people didn’t do basic research
(or even spellchecking!) before writing paid posts.

Is this a Google-only issue? No. All the major search engines have opposed buying and
selling links that affect search engines. For the Forbes article
Google Purges The Payola,
Andy Greenberg asked other search engines about their policies, and the results were unanimous.
From the story:

Search engines hate this kind of paid-for popularity. Google’s Webmaster guidelines ban buying
links just to pump search rankings. Other search engines including Ask, MSN, and Yahoo!, which
mimic Google’s link-based search rankings, also discourage buying and selling links.

Other engines have also commented about this individually, for example, a search engine
representative from Microsoft commented
in a recent interview
and said:

The reality is that most paid links are a.) obviously not objective and b.) very often irrelevant.
If you are asking about those then the answer is absolutely there is a risk. We will not tolerate
bogus links that add little value to the user experience and are effectively trying to game the
system.

Is that why we’ve seen some sites that sell links receive lower PageRank in the Google
toolbar? Yes. If a site is selling links, that can affect our opinion about the value of
that site or cause us to lose trust in that site.

What recourse does a site owner have if their site was selling links that pass PageRank, and
the site’s PageRank in the Google toolbar was lowered? The site owner can address the
violations of the webmaster guidelines and
submit a reconsideration request
in
Google’s Webmaster Central console.
Before doing a reconsideration request, please make sure that all sold links either do not pass
PageRank or are removed.

Is Google trying to tell webmasters how to run their own site? No. We’re giving advice to
webmasters who want to do well in Google. As I said in this video from my
keynote discussion in June 2007,
webmasters are welcome to make their sites however they like, but Google in turn reserves the
right to protect the quality and relevance of our index. To the best of our knowledge, all the
major search engines have adopted similar positions.

Is Google trying to crack down on other forms of advertisements used to drive traffic? No,
not at all. Our webmaster guidelines clearly state that you can use
links as means to get targeted traffic.
In fact, in the
presentation I did in August 2007,
I specifically called out several examples of non-Google advertising that are completely within
our guidelines. We just want disclosure to search engines of paid links so that the paid links
won’t affect search engines.

I’m aware of a site that appears to be buying/selling links. How can I get that information to
Google? Read our official blog post about
how to report paid links
from earlier in 2007. We’ve received thousands and thousands of reports in just a few months, but
we welcome more reports. We appreciate the feedback, because it helps us take direct action as
well as improve our existing algorithmic detection. We also use that data to train new algorithms
for paid links that violate our quality guidelines.

Can I get more information? Sure. I wrote
more answers about paid links
earlier this year if you’d like to read them. And if you still have questions, you can
join the discussion
in our
Webmaster Help Group.

Written by Matt Cutts and Maile Ohye