Yahoo's Jeremy Zawodny Caught In Link Selling Debate
Google Fights Paid
Links & Yahoo Defends Paid Links from Barry over at Search Engine Roundtable
does a great job of recapping the ironic situation of Yahoo blogvangelist Jeremy
Zawodny selling links on his personal blog without using nofollow attributes
while the most direct counterpart he has at Google, Matt Cutts, has been urging
for months that nofollow should be used on paid links.
While Barry’s done the recap, I still wanted to revisit things myself. First,
there’s the nofollow attribute, which was
introduced
earlier this year primarily as a way for blog owners to help combat trackback
and comment spam. Slap a nofollow on links in these areas, and they don’t pass
credit for the search engines that support nofollow.
Todd Friesen dubbed nofollow to be a “link condom” (see
Link Condom: The
Nofollow Parody), a way to interact through links with other sites safely
but not actually touching them, at least as Google, Yahoo and MSN will view it.
But far from a joke, I later
wrote a follow up
on how the link condom parody site was
a good jumping off point on how nofollow had many other uses, including as a
means for those selling links to tell search engines that they meant no harm.
This was a point I made in my original write up on nofollow,
Google, Yahoo,
MSN Unite On Support For Nofollow Attribute For Links. Nevertheless, the
issue of using nofollow in relation to paid links really exploded when O’Reilly
was found to be selling links in August.
O’Reilly In
Debate Over Link Selling covers that situation as well as the issue of
selling links and influencing search engines by buying them in much greater
depth. Nofollow was a solution, I explained, for any publisher not wanting to be
accused of doing something wrong.
Soon after, in
Text links And
PageRank, Google’s Matt Cutts urged the use of nofollow as a safe way for
people to buy links, along with a warning that sites selling links without doing
this might not pass along PageRank.
Not everyone agrees with Matt, as you can see in the comments below his post
or in this discussion over at our Search Engine Watch Forums:
Google’s Matt
Cutts On Link Selling: Sites Might Not Pass Reputation; Buyers Might Get
Targeted More.
Now skip forward to last week.
Zawodny Says No to Link Condoms from Greg Boser covers how he received an
email telling him that he could now buy links on Jeremy’s site (Dave Naylor
got a similar email) and the irony that those links don’t make use of link
condom in the way that Google would prefer, as would likely Jeremy’s employer
Yahoo, as well. Or maybe not Yahoo, given that as some of the articles above
detail, it has come under accusations that its $300 per year Yahoo Directory is
nothing more than a giant link selling network.
I was actually going to drop a note to Jeremy and Matt to get both of their
views on all of this before posting, but
Sponsored Links
from Jeremy over at his blog saves part of that work. In it, he explains his
viewpoint on not using nofollow. To stress his main points:
Those are all fine points, but none of them except the last are likely to
make Matt over at Google happy. I’ll try to channel him as well as comments on
paid link in relation to the impact on search relevancy:
Further down, Jeremy talks about no one up in arms about the Google AdSense
links he carries. Yep, and
O’Reilly In
Debate Over Link Selling has me covering exactly this same point, when it
came up at one of our conferences. AdSense are sponsored links — they’re just
“safe” sponsored links in terms of search relevancy that Google doesn’t mind.
Need more from Matt directly?
SES Chicago 2005 I think has some fresh comments from him below the post on
link selling, as does
?Tell me about your backlinks?.
What’s going to happen to Jeremy? As Greg notes, he’s not going to be yanked
from Google. His site is far too important for that. But Google might prevent it
from passing along link juice to others. Apparently, I’m told by others (not
Google itself) that Google’s done the same to Search Engine Watch because of our
SEW Marketplace ads that we sell.
If so, Google’s just stupid. If it can’t figure out that we carry the same
sponsored links in the same area and filter out that part, really — they’re
dumb. They’re even dumber if they have to wipe out the ability of an entire site
to help influence its results in a good way. We link to many excellent things —
including things Google wants people to know about. Our links don’t carry weight
because Google’s not smart enough? And Jeremy’s site might not carry weight as
well? Please.
If you’re interested, that
O’Reilly In
Debate Over Link Selling covers the former paid link program we had here and
how ultimately, the SEW Marketplace ads might move to using nofollow down the
line. But since none of these were ever sold as ways to help people rank, it’s
kind of a pain to have to retroactively make that type of move.
Want to comment or discuss? Visit our forum thread,
Yahoo’s
Zawodny In Paid Links & Nofollow Debate.
Postscript: Matt adds his thoughts on the situation over in
Text link follow-up which in summary says yes, he still thinks nofollow is
the way to go, but Jeremy’s free to do as he likes on his site, just as search
engines will be free to decide what sites they want to trust based on linkage
patterns. But it’s more fun to read his actual post, especially because he plays
a game of Six Degrees, getting from a paid link to a sex positions web site in
two mouse clicks.