Hi everyone! Hope you all had a great and productive week. So, what criteria does Google use to determine whether a link is paid or not? Great question, isn’t it? Well, in this 7 minute video Matt Cutts talks about the various things that they can take into consideration when determining if a link is “paid” or not. Quite interesting and considering that links are still important, you may want to see what he has to say, just to be on the safe side.
What is a paid link?
Next news that I found noteworthy this week was that of a “Google Webmaster Thread” reported by SERoundtable regarding off topic links. Off topic links are essentially unrelated sites that link to you, meaning, their topic normally is different from yours. Google’s John Mueller went on record by saying:
Just to be completely clear on this: you do not need to disavow links that are from sites on other topics. This tool is really only meant for situations where there are problematic, unnatural, PageRank-passing links that you can’t have removed.
There you go. With this info, you should be able to reduce a bit your workload, when working on your link profile.
And all is about quality content creation nowadays. Actually, it is not new that content has been the driving force of the internet. The only difference now is that more emphasis needs to be done to create awesome content and publish them on quality sites. Now that’s all easier said than done. To help you out, SEJ published a very interesting article this week on how to engage ideas for content. Totally worth reading.
And as usual, in no particular order:
Content Creation & Marketing/SEO and Search
- The Beginner’s Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization
- Scaling Up the Effort: The Process Behind Great (Contracted) Content
- Stop Building Your Branded Content on “Rented Land”
- Google: Don’t Disavow Links Based On Arbitrary Metrics
Social/Small Business Bites
- Everything You Need To Know About Gmail’s Auto-Unsubscribe
- You Can Now Use Millions Of High-Quality Pics From Getty On You Site For Free
- Unlimited Pinterest Secret Boards: This Week in Social Media
- Discover How Often People Mention You and Retweet Your Tweets
More recommended read!
That’s it! Enjoy and have a great weekend!
Hi Francisco,
As always, another great roundup. This will keep me busy for a while! Thanks for including my #FridayFinds post too.
Is it my imagination or have many bloggers stepped up their game lately when it comes to providing quality content by linking to multiple resources in recap type posts? I know you’ve been publishing your roundup for a long time now but I’m noticing more of this type of article – which is good of course!
Andrew
This was really interesting. So if the link is highly payed and valuable, or if it’s not payed with money but the something else is granter for it, like some service has been done or sth else, Google will not count it as ‘bad backlink’ right? That’s how I understand it, correct me if I’m wrong.
Well how can Google or anyone be 100% sure how much someone payed to the webmaster for a link, or what has he given to him? These are just general stories. If you ask me, if some website gets manually checked by Google spam team, they will still check for the links which looks like LQ ones, like the ones made in spammy comments which are not related to the site’s topic.
They can’t be 100% sure if it’s payed or not. That’s just my opinion.
Thanks for sharing!
Regards,
Andrew