Don’t Believe The Hype
Greywolf has a great post today, where he reminds us not to swallow the Kool-Aid Google’s own hype man is continually shoving down our throats.
From the post:
The real point here is don’t buy into the FUD that search engines propogate to serve their own self intrests. Don’t beleive them when they get all spooky and CIA on you with lines like “google knows much”, because they don’t, and if they did they wouldn’t need to say things like that to scare you into aquesing to their will. Don’t let them tell you how to run your business or your website in a way that doesn’t make sense to you and help you stay profitable.
Aside from the several spelling mistakes, this block of text speaks the truth, and it can be applied to more than just Google’s stance on paid links. However, let’s stay with that because it’s what everyone is talking about these days.
Google says they’re going to start penalizing sites who charge money for links, but this conflicts with several sections of their own webmaster guidelines. In particular:
Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!…
Last time I checked, Yahoo! charged for inclusion into their directory, and it isn’t cheap. So does this mean that paid directories are exempt from the hand-slapping for selling paid links?
Make pages for users, not for search engines.
However, if your users would be interested in another website, and the owner of that site is willing to pay you for a link, you are not allowed to put that link on your site.
Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings…Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
Yes, I would buy and sell links if search engines didn’t exist, but now they’re telling me that I shouldn’t.
In the end, you should do whatever makes the most sense for your business and stop worrying about what Matt Cutts says. If you “Fight The Power” and realize that “911 FUD Is A Joke” “You’re Gonna Get Yours” when it’s time to cash checks.
Yes, I realize how lame that was.
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heh spell checkers are for wimps
not lame at all…
I think you’re right. At Google’s heart should be a quest to find only the good stuff on the web and sift out the junk that its users don’t want to see. If that’s the case, they would never discourage “junk” sites from buying links…that would make them easier to find.