Beginning the first month of this year, Google has been very sincere in curbing spam and maintaining a strong relation among webmasters. In fact, Big G has started to send out more notifications from its webmaster tool for any suspicion of Spam-related issues as well as other information about penalties for paid links. Now there are reports scattering on the web that Google has yet send out more notifications, this time for webmasters’ bad links posting at Google to be addressed.
I happen to download a sample of the said notification from Google, which distinctly stress the usage of techniques which violates some of the provisions of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. The sample notification also state two things: unnatural links pointing to a website and the unnatural links on the website pointing to other sites. Artificial or unnatural linking includes paid links that were used to manipulate PageRank.
It can be remembered that Google started its campaign in penalizing webmasters who uses paid links in October of 2007. Since then more and more people are on the verge of wonder whether they have lost traffic on the search engine for selling paid links. If a site is spotted to be involved in link selling activities, Google automatically prevent links from a site or some pages within a website from passing PageRank.
Admittedly, the issue about paid links is quite a debatable one. In fact, some time in April there was quite a great argument between the pro and the anti paid links. Well actually, my stand with this issue remains in the following:
First, that Google owns the search engine. The people initiating the policies on the Webmaster Guidelines have the right to say that selling links are bad and they might penalize anybody for such act once caught for it. Second, Google’s stand is always simple: don’t sell links if you want to pass PageRank. This however was misunderstood as well. For instance, there was an argument that Google was not informing people what to do with their sites alongside the many updates on their guidelines. But on the other side Google was also telling people what to do if they are worried about doing better in Google. Lastly, I think instead of creating a war with paid links, Google should also find ways to determine whether the link deserve any credit, paid or not.
And so, all these regular webmaster guidelines update and notifications are but part of a holistic development for Google to curb any unrelated means in topping on its page results. These things will definitely test every professional’s mastery on producing quality, genuine and organic links for it to top and not flank in the number one search engine in the world.
