Google certainly should penalize spammy, unnatural links ... and any attempt to get them. On the other hand, I hope it’s not against the rules to encourage relevant and earnest links. I should take the page down if there’s any doubt. Meanwhile, I’ve added a very strong warning that links should be editorially relevant and sincere.

In any case, the “donate by linking” page is quite new. The domain move disaster was months old by the time I first published it.

Update: I have now stripped out any possible connotation of soliciting links, in an (over?) abundance of caution. Instead of “Donate by Linking,” the page is now just “Linking Information” and provides only factual information about what constitutes a correct and relevant link to PainScience.com. I believe the original page encouraged only sincere, natural linking well within the spirit of Google’s rules, but with these changes I hope there’s no longer any possibility of misinterpretation.

This could certainly be critical. Just a theory: Perhaps moving domains triggered a "recalculation" of the link values to the site, and he fell due to violations like this?

Or, more likely, the domain move triggered a manual review and somebody at Google didn't like this page.

I worked in SEO and talked to a guy who manually checked a lot of websites for google. This was a few years ago, but he implied that there was a small army of people manually checking websites.

"Google's manual for its unseen humans who rate the web" -- http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/27/google_raters_manual...

this is a different team than the people that manually review for penalties.

Why is that against the rules? Asking for links is not against the rules.

Asking for links just to boost search engine ranking is at least frowned upon, if not "against the rules". See this[1] for an extreme example of how seriously Google takes this.

[1] http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2321516/rap-genius-no-...

Here's a summary of Google's position on the subject: http://searchengineland.com/google-its-unnatural-to-even-ask...

It's not very clear what sort of asking is permitted, but I'm pretty sure that the sort of asking that Paul Ingraham is doing is not ok. He's specifically asking people to create links in a way that is unnatural.

Sure google hate it as it games the system. You pay for links and your site rises up the natural search. This eats into their AdWords service and pollutes natural search.

But big websites that aren't ad driven use paid links to fund the site. We were paying big sites (think three letter domain names, top five newspaper sites, etc) for links. Say a paper writes an article on car insurance - wouldn't it be nice if they linked to our customers site and 'forgot' to mention a big competitor. Money will make that happen.

So how can google punish these big sites? They are put in an impossible situation.

And he did it again at the end of this article.

I don't see a problem with this, he says link only if you mean it.