Luna Tail

I agree with you about PageRank being meaningless. I've actually thought that for awhile. It doesn't factor in many important pieces, like what kind of site it is, what kind of content it has, and the quality of that content. When sploggers can make it to the top of Google just by using blackhat SEO methods and other bloggers who write paid posts can be banned from their results altogether, there is no meaning to the metric. Thanks for the Digg and the link.

Reported PageRank (via the google toolbar) does not relate directly to ranking in search engine results. I know high quality PR0 sites that rank very well, have lots of traffic, and have high profile advertisers on their books. But they sell links, and therefore google does not, and should not trust them to vote for other sites. I am often bemused why people complain about google's attack on paid links. They are CLEARLY a massive problem for all search engines (and everyone who uses search engines). If paid links were tolerated and were effective, then search results would effectively turn into a big list of sponsored results. When people search they want to find the most relevant sites to their search. They don't want a list of sites, ordered by how much money those sites are willing to pay for visitors. How would you feel if some other site out ranked you simply because they had more money, and bought more links?

Hi Andrew thanks for your comment. I am not a SEO expert, but I have never found google searchings bringing me to paid link posts in blogs. Especially not my own. And I am not asking Google to rank me higher because I am willing to pay for links. I want Google to rank me, period, because of my blog content. The fact that I have paid links or not should be irrelevant in their criteria. Since it is relevant to their ranking criteria, and is, in fact, the ONLY thing they are now looking at for many blogs, their ranking is meaningless to those blogs, and decreases the entire value of the PR system as it is discriminatory. It is unfortunate that many bloggers’ income is highly dependent on what their PR is because advertisers will only pay for the higher PR blogs. Little do advertisers know that a good quality blog can have very low, or nonexistent, PR.

Whether a blog has paid links or does not have paid links is, in my opinion, not an indicator of whether a blog is quality or not. This opinion is shared by, I would guess to say, the majority of the (paid) blogging community. Of course there is a great deal of debate whether bloggers should make money from their blogs or not, but that topic is not part of this post so I won’t debate that here.
If you want to get a good example of people who are posting paid links, please please check out Karoli’s post, because she gives an excellent account of who us paid bloggers are, and how evil (or un-evil) we truly are.

I appreciate the debate with you.

Hi Andrew thanks for your comment. I am not a SEO expert, but I have never found google searchings bringing me to paid link posts in blogs. Especially not my own. And I am not asking Google to rank me higher because I am willing to pay for links. I want Google to rank me, period, because of my blog content. The fact that I have paid links or not should be irrelevant in their criteria. Since it is relevant to their ranking criteria, and is, in fact, the ONLY thing they are now looking at for many blogs, their ranking is meaningless to those blogs, and decreases the entire value of the PR system as it is discriminatory. It is unfortunate that many bloggers' income is highly dependent on what their PR is because advertisers will only pay for the higher PR blogs. Little do advertisers know that a good quality blog can have very low, or nonexistent, PR. Whether a blog has paid links or does not have paid links is, in my opinion, not an indicator of whether a blog is quality or not. This opinion is shared by, I would guess to say, the majority of the (paid) blogging community. Of course there is a great deal of debate whether bloggers should make money from their blogs or not, but that topic is not part of this post so I won't debate that here. If you want to get a good example of people who are posting paid links, please please check out Karoli's post, because she gives an excellent account of who us paid bloggers are, and how evil (or un-evil) we truly are. I appreciate the debate with you.

Thanks for the response Cynthia. I notice your 'I disclose' link, which is great. But why aren't you disclosing your paid links in a way search engines can understand? (ie by using the nofollow tag or javascript or redirects that robots are blocked from)