I really enjoy the way that you write.

So should we only advertise our clients websites on websites that have the ability to bring direct business and not buy links for the purpose of effecting page rank.

This seems fair yet our competitors clients are paying for links and rating higher on the engines then ours. Yet when we tell this to our clients they do not understand as their competitors are displayed higher on the search results.

For instance, once i wanted to change my web host provider and decided to search for a particular host on the net. I found the top ten results with 60% of it belonging to some blogs that do reviews on hosting company. (They are paid by hosting companies).

I went into one of it which did an honest review on one of the company and stated the good features of it, however the blogger missed all the other bad features such as poor customer service. These points were however brought up by many visitors who left tons of comments on it. The blogger was doing the right thing by allowing honest comments to show up on paid reviews. However, his site was penalized by Google’s recent PR update and went down from PR3 – PR0.

Is this called fairness? You can’t judge a site by just looking at their paid links. That site was providing relevant and informative contents.

The point is that it shouldn’t be those with the deepest pockets always rank for what they want.

The other point to bare in mind is that Google isn’t the only search engine out there, and the others are no where near as advanced in tackling the paid links problem. So even if Google were to get the perfect solution in place today, paid links will still work for some years to come.

I expected an answer like this, which is good and also bad in some respect.

I am sure that Google is aware of the fact that there is a (slow) but noticeable trend in affiliate marketing towards tracking mechanisms that link to merchant sites directly where the link does pass PR from the affiliate site to the advertisers website.

The SEO benefit is only one reason for this trend, but not the most important one.

The main reason is the increased blocking of affiliate links and deletion of network tracking cookies by browser plug-ins (blocking the ads) and even by anti-virus/ad/spyware vendors (deleting the cookies), which causes 5% and more in loss of commission for affiliate publishers (and revenue loss to the network, which usually charges a percentage of the commission paid to publishers as fee for their services).

So this issue will only become bigger for Google and has to be addressed eventually. I suggest to read the post aimed for Bloggers about how to leverage affiliate marketing and what the slip falls are. I referred to it in my original post.

Cheers!
Carsten

Suppose a real case many years ago. At that time it didn’t exist the blog, and so my experience was completely based on a full web site, made with ASP 1.0. At that time I started that web site, and hosting plan in 1999 didn’t cost a bunch of dollars like today.
I spent for two years about 120$ / month just to be hosted and provided my conoissance for free through that web site, without any way to monetirize anything.
Just some banner (friend banner) first and the last 3 month paied banner that never never never re-paid me the monthly fee.

So … it was 2001 … and my first experience (and I was one of the greatest web site about that argument) was put side by side within other web site within econominal income provided by banners, link, ads and whatever you want.

So my free time sacrified for nothing and never repaid. I worked alone because no revenue could afford me any useful help, against company …

What do you think where is my web site? In the WC of course, while other company’s web site today still lives.

So, the right answer as Matt Cutt, is the number 3 … but at Google they start to rely more on human resource for this kind of check and not simply thinking that algorithm could solve everything.

They need more personnel … Matt you can start to evaluate some CV. I could be available if you are looking some Italian guy.

thanks for your comment.

Regarding the blog, I will not go into details with that. You probably do not have your own blog with a large readership that you built up over the years, because you would not have said what you did. You probably also don’t have some personal friends who run a high traffic blog that eats more and more of their time to the point where they don’t have a “life” anymore beyond the blog.

Back to the topic of the post.

“Google doesn’t stop or hinder anyone to use paid links or content. Period. ”

Fine, I did not say anything against that, but I would like to know what a paid link is, in the eyes of Google. As far as I know did Google not provide a definition of “paid”. As already pointed out by other, every link is paid if you boil it down to the basics. The only thing that differentiates them is the HOW they are paid and the HOW MUCH.

There was already some progress made regarding the definition, but it is a bit unclear in some areas. I don’t want to get penalized by Google while I build my sites for the user and not for them, because of a different understanding of what they consider paid and I don’t.

Sounds simple, eh? Well, getting answers is not. Trust me. Other people stated opinions, but Google didn’t so far.

The fact is that many affiliate links go through several redirects and don’t flow PageRank, so Google wouldn’t be concerned with such links at all. However, if your affiliate link were a direct static link that passes PageRank and you get paid for even placing that affiliate link on your site whether or not someone clicks on it, that would look pretty close to a paid link to us.