Matt Cutts' Paid Links Update
Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team, has taken time out of his vacation to add some clarification to his post about Google’s treatment of paid links. The original post has been widely discussed, with search marketers and webmasters coming down strongly on both sides – either happy that Google is cracking down on what they see as Web spam, or indignant that Google is dictating how they do business.
To clarify, Cutts’ is asking webmasters to report instances of paid links that flow PageRank, meaning they are direct links to a site, without “nofollow” attributes:
As someone working on quality and relevance at Google, my bottom-line concern is clean and relevant search results on Google. As such, I care about paid links that flow PageRank and attempt to game Google’s rankings. I’m not worried about links that are paid but don’t affect search engines. So when I say “paid links” it’s pretty safe to add in your head “paid links that flow PageRank and attempt to game Google’s rankings.”
Cutts also clarifies how Google may use the reports of paid links it gets from users:
He stresses that the reports are not going directly into algorithms, so it’s not likely a competitor can buy links to another’s site and report them to damage their ranking in Google’s results
Cutts says he’s not lumping directories into this paid links discussion, but he does offer some questions to consider when buying a link in a directory, if you’re hoping it will pass PageRank:
Cutts also suggests putting on a “user hat” when considering the kind of user experience paid, irrelevant links would create. As Google’s quality guidelines suggest, sites should be made for users, not search engines, so Cutts is not talking about buying links that are relevant to a site to drive traffic.