It's Time For Google To Take A Stand On Paid Links

Re:It's Time For Google To Take A Stand On Paid Links by dejb on Wednesday September 09, 2009 @07:57PM (#814240)

When you have things of value that can be sold or exchanged you will allways have a market. If some authority tries to ban the exchange then it will be a 'black' market. The harder Google tries to enforce their policies the more it will drive the selling or exchange of links underground. Maybe this would be a good thing but there is certainly no way they can stamp it out.

I personally think that the problem lies in the rules of Google's system. A more robust system should be able to account for and adjust for the market realities created by it's own rules. Maybe it is technically impossible but I doubt it. I'm sure the clever people at google have thought of this as well but perhaps they are starting to face 'legacy' system issues themselves.

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Re:It's Time For Google To Take A Stand On Paid Links by halo on Wednesday September 09, 2009 @09:13PM (#814362)

Perhaps Google already algorithmically detects and quietly penalises such link-farming, or has tweaked their algorithm to minimise its impact. From their quality guidelines (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en...):

Google prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to problems, so we attempt to minimize hand-to-hand spam fighting. The spam reports we receive are used to create scalable algorithms that recognize and block future spam attempts.

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Re:It's Time For Google To Take A Stand On Paid Links by dejb on Wednesday September 09, 2009 @09:31PM (#814391)

I'll bet they do but they can only detect the most obvious cases. It would be possible for website to sell links that even a human couldn't identify as sold, so there are limits to what their algorithms could achieve.

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