It’s no secret that Google hates link trades and it seems that most of the top SEO pros think Google can’t tell if a link is a bought, sold or legitimate link. This really stuffs up Googles rankings which are influenced by links and the link text pointing to the site which is why many webmasters are buying up.
Google says they don’t mind websites have sponsored links providing they include the no-follow tag so they know not to count that as a vote for the site being linked to. That’s enough of that as I’m sure you have already read thousands of other blog posts about link selling and it is becoming a rather boring subject. What I noticed today was an interesting addition to Google’s homepage. Google has added a link for StumbleUpon reviews. See image below.
I only got this link when using Firefox and was logged into my Gmail account. When you click on the link you are taken to StumbleUpon where you can sign in to your Gmail account and see which friends are already using StumbleUpon and you can even invite the rest of your friends.
It seems to me, Google is looking for ways to combat link selling by moving towards a user based review system. I’m not sure if this is going to help them combat link selling because there is always someone out there who will find a way to game the system. We humans love to break rules and we do it almost in every we do. One example is that our sports people are often found for breaking the rules with performance enhancing drugs. People love to break the rules and find an edge and regardless of what Google does, someone, somewhere will find a way to game the system.
It’s interesting to see where Google is going with this and I’ll keep my eyes and ears open for any further developments.
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