Link popularity is still the trump card for gaining higher PageRank and will remain so, at least for a foreseeable period. To gain high PR, many webmasters get involved in buying high PR links from other websites. No doubt this hurts the relevancy of search engines. Matt Cutts writes on this topic in his blog here with an excellent illustration of the topic.

He explains with an example, how seriously paid links can hurt a user’s objective of using search engines.

I do agree with Matt over this. Paid reviews and links definitely hurt the quality of index maintained by search engines and add a lot of irrelevancy in our search results. However, this is the guideline that Google has itself violated, repeatedly.

Aaron Wall, writes in his blog, how Google has been caught repeatedly selling high PageRank links. See here and here. Google has been cross promoting products with high PR links from its sites.

They set the guidelines and violate those guidelines themselves.

And as Aaron says,

“If Google does something like that it is a co-brand cross promotion, and all is well. If I do something like that it is an attempt to manipulate Google and/or a spammy link buy.”

I agree with him, unless Google corrects it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 19th, 2007 at 11:17 am and is filed under Search Engines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.