helot.org

The almighty Google set a policy against link buyers and sellers which reads “punish punish punish”.

Fighting the so-called webspam might be a noble thing and I don’t think there is anyone out there who would mind it, except the spammers, of course. We can only applaud Google for finally taking action against garbage that appears in the SERPs. The problem is that under the spam umbrella Google places all sites that sell and buy links. This is not right! But for the sake of argument, let’s assume that Google is right (there might be some twisted convoluted logic behind it). How does the almighty Google explain the fact that the link buying & selling is fully justified when a portion of the money involved trickles down to the pockets of Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Here is and example of what I’m taking about:

Search for link sale on google.com

You see the “Sposored Links”on the Google result page? Let’s deal with the ads one by one.

One may say that it is OK to sell links that don’t pass any pagerank. Well well well…

www.LinkAdage.com is an Internet auctioneer specializing in links sale. Here is an example taken from their page:

“For the first time ever this 5 year old technical journal of an “Internet Architect” will be selling text link ads. This is a very clean site, and since it has never sold links until now, PR is sure to be passed on. Your PR4 text link ad will be on the home page of this website.

Get in early. Only 10 links will be sold. Currently 2 of 10 links have been sold.(http://www.linkadage.com/Auction/APViewItem.asp?ID=60561)”.

Any doubts that the links won’t be “nofollow”?

Next one.

http://www.linkexchangeexperts.com - a link exchange system offering 800 backlinks for $24.95 per month

“If you decide to join, all of these will be linking to you. If you decide to buy the subscription, you will have all of these as one-way links which the major search engines give more importance. We have a robot that checks everyone on the system to make sure all of the links stay on their website. We have software that lets you check each website that points to yours. If you are not happy with the way your PR is growing you can cancel at any time. You can get free links or Pay. There is no risk to you. (http://www.linkexchangeexperts.com/FAQ.aspx)”

Any doubts that the links won’t be “nofollow”?

Next

http://www.sponsoredreviews.com/ an innocent sponsored article seller. Provides examples of blog articles and believe me there is no “nofollow” tag to be found anywhere.

Examples are available on this page:

http://www.sponsoredreviews.com/advertisers.asp

The remaining three sites:

http://www.b2bwebonline.com/

http://www.buy-link.eu/

http://www.goodprlinks.com/

are bid directories – some vagueness around those since they are human reviewed and Google is not very specific whether this type of “paid link” is allowed or not. Some of the Web directories get banned and some survive just fine. Only Google knows the standard it applies to directories.

Certainly my favorite search engine runs a double standard.

It says NO to regular guys who try to sell links and YES to those who are doing the same via Adwords. After all, Google gets paid for that transaction and buries its own guidelines in the process. So, it’s Ok for a site to sell links as long as it is willing to share the profits with Google.
If Larry and Sergey, two guys who make billions of $$$, can’t resist a little Adword payola, it’s obvious that small guys like you and me will go for that pocket change like dogs for a bone and sell links violating the Google guidelines.  But watch out!!! The buzzword from Larry and Sergey is “No No No”. And these guys will surely screw your site beyond recognition if you don’t stick to the guidelines  even they don’t like.