Comments on: Paid Links : Do You Report Them?

By: Nick

Nick — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 11:12:20 +0000

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.

By: Don Bowlby

Don Bowlby — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 17:55:27 +0000

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.

By: MendyO

MendyO — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 04:15:21 +0000

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.

By: CarstenCumbrowski

CarstenCumbrowski — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 05:43:34 +0000

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?

By: Search◊ Engines Web

Search◊ Engines Web — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 05:19:30 +0000

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.

By: NineWest

NineWest — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 03:11:25 +0000

I will not report a website unless Google offer some reward for it. Maybe 10 dollars for each reported website will impress me :D

By: Affordable SEO - Terry Reeves

Affordable SEO - Terry Reeves — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 23:35:02 +0000

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.

By: Jonathan Dingman

Jonathan Dingman — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 21:44:05 +0000

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….

By: SEO Videos

SEO Videos — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 18:35:16 +0000

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.

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 18:25:11 +0000

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