This is starting to sound more like the RIAA complaining about a new business model undercutting its revenue. Google is not keeping up with people or technology in this case. People have figured out how to exploit (to a great enough degree) Google's ability to tell a spam site from an authority, and their response is to declare that people are in violation.
Their TOS is more of a spec than an agreement. It says that if you sell links, they may flag you as a spam site. I don't think that's unreasonable at all.
As an internal policy or part of their algorithm, do whatever you want. But that is not what they are doing. The point of the policy, the point of this publicly declared part of their secret sauce is not to recognise and flag spam sites, it is to intimidate sites into stopping a practice which hurts Google. It is the effects of the intimidation not the effects of the flagging which are substantial. I think it is also safe to say that they are the purpose of the policy.
If they are flagging sites with a legitimate purpose and with original content, simply on the basis that their evermore dated method for determining authority is not working so well anymore, Google (as an authority themselves) should not be flagging them with such a label. I think it is unreasonable, not for denying them traffic, but for labeling them as spam. It's not impossible to find out who's in the supplemental index all of a sudden.
Danny Sullivan's comments below the Business Insider article are spot on.
In his words, "Plenty of people get this stuff already. It's been out there again, for years."
It started with the whole nofollow issue.
To be fair, the post misquotes Matt Cuts. He didn't say terms of service. He said:"paid links that pass PageRank are absolutely a violation of Google's quality guidelines"
Spam: thin site, lacks original content, few pages indexed, crawled infrequently, ranks for a small selection of keywords, weak backlink profile
Authority: many pages indexed, thick site, loads of original content, crawled frequently, ranks for a variety of keywords, diversified backlink profile
Page Rank used to be a strong indicator of this, but currently a better indicator is how often your site is crawled. That's why one authority link can do worlds more for you than hundreds (or thousands) of spammy/low quality links.
I would expect that these true spam sites exist as a link network somewhat seperate from the rest of the web. You could start manually defining filters based on what sites are actively selling links on the digital point forums.
We may have actually had this conversation in the real world, come to think of it.
* i would assume that the problem parallels with spam emails. i think webpages offer more clues to what the page is about than emails though.
There is a trick to save you the obscene costs of being indexed -- simply make your robots.txt like so: User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /
Were they supposed to foresee people buying links back in 2003/2004?
You have to have new policy or terms for new use cases.
*the article feels like a bit of a 'hit job' on conductor / I would like to offer up that things might be at least a little different than they seem from one side/point of view.
Google forbids us to sell links not because it wishes to do away with linkselling, but because it wishes to monopolize it.
If someone wants to buy a link but isn't interested in only receiving the traffic it brings (and not any pagerank), they are probably up to no good anyway.
I personally think that the problem lies in the rules of Google's system. A more robust system should be able to account for and adjust for the market realities created by it's own rules. Maybe it is technically impossible but I doubt it. I'm sure the clever people at google have thought of this as well but perhaps they are starting to face 'legacy' system issues themselves.
Google prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to problems, so we attempt to minimize hand-to-hand spam fighting. The spam reports we receive are used to create scalable algorithms that recognize and block future spam attempts.
It's fine to have an algorithm to prioritize sites. And it's fine for sites to manipulate that algorithm to their own ends. Both of these things are completely natural.
Trying to keep this list of who's cool or not -- secretly updated by god knows who -- and forcing the rest of the world to do as you say or suffer economic punishment by de-listing from your engine? Not fine, although Google is certainly in their rights to do so.
A better strategy is for Google to adapt, not dictate. As it is, they've created this entire system where everybody games the system but nobody talks about it, and that's counterproductive for the net as a whole.
Google should become better at what they are doing, work harder on identifying spam sites. Crawl more frequently to get a better grip on provenance.
Maybe set up an 'announce' service where you can dump a url before linking it to establish provenance for your original content.
Dictation is not a solution to anything it is a show of weakness.
I think Google have made it pretty clear that as far as they're concerned they don't want people selling links to other sites in a way designed to manipulate search-engine rankings, and if you do so you may be delisted or have a lowered ranking on their site in the future. I think that's specific enough, personally, and think that anyone wanting a more specific policy either wants to work around them to violate the intended spirit and complain if and when Google punishes them for doing so.
Most reputable SEO firms refrain from paid links nowadays and rather focus on "killer content" creation to get links naturally.
