More ways for you to give us input

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

At Google, we are always working hard to provide searchers with the best possible results. We’ve
found that
our spam reporting form
is a great way to get your input as we continue to improve our results. Some of you have asked for
a way to report paid links as well.

Links are an important signal in our PageRank calculations, as they tend to indicate when someone
has found a page useful. Links that are purchased are great for advertising and traffic purposes,
but aren’t useful for PageRank calculations. Buying or selling links to manipulate results and
deceive search engines
violates our guidelines.

Today, in response to your request, we’re providing a paid links reporting form within Webmaster
Tools. To use the form, simply log in and provide information on the sites buying and selling
links for purposes of search engine manipulation. We’ll review each report we get and use this
feedback to improve our algorithms and improve our search results. in some cases we may also take
individual action on sites.

If you are selling links for advertising purposes, there are many ways you can designate this,
including:

• Adding the nofollow value to the rel attribute of an a tag
• Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a
  robots.txt file

We value your input and look forward to continuing to improve our great partnership with you.