Patrick Altoft is hosting a poll on whether or not search marketers report paid linking. Patrick admits that he usually only reports paid links “only when the site buying or selling them was a direct competitor and ranked higher than me.”
So far 68% of the voters claim that they do not report paid links to the search engines.
Personally, I report spam from time to time, like the Google Groups spam that was appearing in Yahoo search results or obvious spam on occasion, but not paid linking.
How about you?
Comments
14 responses so far ↓
Mike - Twenty Steps on Jan 15, 2008 at 9:29 am
I’m the same as you, Loren. I’ve not submitted a paid link snitch but have reported spam (mainly scraper sites plastered with AdSense).
There’s something fundamentally wrong with the idea of us having to report paid links back to Big G. Reporting spam is something I’ll do in a heartbeat but paid links? I dunno. It just doesn’t feel right besides how can you 100% guarantee that the link is paid?
Let’s put obvious flags to one side (i.e. TLA, Sponsors, *koff* Supporters), how can you know without a shadow of a doubt that a link within a page is definitely paid? And let’s just say that you can spot it, shouldn’t the Big G be able to as well?
Like I said, it just doesn’t feel right for so many reasons.
Mike - Twenty Steps on Jan 15, 2008 at 9:30 am
P.S. I know your Supporters links are no-followed but you can see where I’m coming from ;)
Patrick Altoft on Jan 15, 2008 at 10:03 am
I think it’s important to make a judgement call depending on how you feel about the site selling links.
For example I would never report a “real” site that was trying to make some more cash by selling links but if I saw a site with no purpose other than to sell links then I might consider reporting it.
Jonathan Dingman on Jan 15, 2008 at 10:48 am
Reporting paid links is sooooo 2007…..
Matt on Jan 15, 2008 at 1:25 pm
To report links because competitors rank higher than you do is so stupid. Can you prove it is paid?
Or you do it just because they rank higher and you have found a reason to do some harm?
If the guy above you spams and uses stupid text stuffing and hiding, I understand. But paid links…sounds so wrong. Let’s all report our competitors…hooray
SEO Videos on Jan 15, 2008 at 1:35 pm
Reporting Paid Links will definitely make Matt Cutts happy, anyways I never done that & I think that only your competitors will do that for you.
Jonathan Dingman on Jan 15, 2008 at 4:44 pm
Matt,
Even if something is labeled “sponsored,” there’s still no way to definitely say they are “paid” links.
It’s a lost cause that Google is fighting. Supposedly, Yahoo! and MSN are “fighting” paid links too….
Affordable SEO - Terry Reeves on Jan 15, 2008 at 6:35 pm
I will report spam and I see paid links every day. If I can see them, Google should be able to see them also.
I don’t work for Google.
NineWest on Jan 15, 2008 at 10:11 pm
I will not report a website unless Google offer some reward for it. Maybe 10 dollars for each reported website will impress me :D
Searchâ—Š Engines Web on Jan 16, 2008 at 12:19 am
The tactic that SearchEnginesWEB used to great success was not to focus on band-aid approaches - but to communicate the root of the problem to the search quality engineers.
By posting and explaining tenaciously to them WHY Webmasters had no choice but to use certain gray hat tactics to compete - this changed their attitudes about the gray area of acceptability.
Showing them how it was in their best interest to keep the SERPs balanced and democratic.
Believe it or not - they are now somewhat more tolerant of paid links and other minor gray hat tactics.
They key was persistent communication to people who otherwise had no reason to empathize.
CarstenCumbrowski on Jan 16, 2008 at 12:43 am
ditto.. I reported and continue to report severe and obvious cases of spam that are bad for the users as well as honest webmasters who try to add value (regardless if it does add value for myself or not).
This includes cases of deceptive cloaking and content scraping, but paid links nope, unless I would come across severe examples of paid links like the ones Matt Cutts provided in some of his posts.
The problem with those is that they are hard to come by. At least when it comes to sites that still rank anywhere. There is no point in reporting a site that was already torched by Google, isn’t there?
MendyO on Jan 16, 2008 at 11:15 pm
I am not and SEO or SEM company and could in fact snitch on my competition to my advantage. I looked into my soul and came to the conclusion that I just could not snitch. My competitors are not bad people and I decided that the best way to get an advantage was by having a better glass jewelry site and better content which will hopefully lead to better incoming links. If they are doing something they shouldn’t, I’ll let the G’law nab the evildoers. I don’t need the bad karma.
Don Bowlby on Jan 17, 2008 at 12:55 pm
No I don’t report them. Who has the time to police that? I like to leave that up to the search engines to figure out. Link farm, scraper or AdSense sites, yes but not paid links specifically.
Nick on Jan 21, 2008 at 6:12 am
Didn’t think yet about that - have a lot of work :). But to be seriously - this has a sense because very fair web master should care about clean WWW and make it clean from dishonest guys.
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