WebProNews

I'd like to preface this by thanking the author for shedding some light on this subject.  The concept seems to make sense.  However, I there is one thing I still don't understand about this entire situation.

How does Google know the difference between a link that was paid for privately between webmasters and a link that was posted free-of-charge?  I understand that it's fairly easy to spot TLA links, but how can they tell if there are no scripts involved or code that gives it away (assuming they're not using gmail to set up and g-checkouts to facilitate the transaction)?

I see nothing wrong with this and give credit to the person who came up with it.  First of all, Google's AdWords program is just another form of paid links anyway.  If a webmaster can find a way to get more traffic to his site by paying a little money out in advertising, why not?  Who died and made Google boss anyway?

I normally delete all the spam I get from webpronews, but I actually read some of this. I think you people give entirely too much power to google.

The only way google is finding out about paid links is from people advertising them and then the snitches go and tell on them.

Besides, when the hell did google create the rules for the internet? When they start caring about my bottom line, I might give a crap about all their idiotic 'rules'.

Hi Jason

It is a little complicated, but there isn't anything really sinister about it, and it is something that actually happens naturally with good content.

I have always advocated high editorial standards with paid review content. It has to stand on its own, and get high editorial praise.

The blocked reviews don't pass any juice, though they can rank because they are dangling pages that Google just can't index, just like a terrible flash site in many ways.

As a dangling page they also might not accumulate juice in the same way as a page that is part of the iteration process, but that is something hard to quantify.

A lot of it boils down to a very distinct editorial process such as when WPM select articles for syndication. As an example I did highlight one of my reviews that was a featured article on WPN sister site SearchNewz.

That is a very prominent example, but syndication happens on all blogs whether you like it or not, in the for of splogs and scrapers.

The same happens with social media and social networks which allow you to resyndicate your feed.

Linking through to such profiles is a natural occurance

As with all naturally occuring phenomenens on the web, there are ways to encourage it, and sharing blog content is effectively the same as article marketing, only you have the ability to also provide graphical elements.

This certainly doesn't rely on a single occurance of an article on my domain ranking, I always have the alternative of a duplicate content page ranking instead (and I do nofollow all outgoing links on those pages with my nofollow those dupes plugin)

Ultimately good content will find a way to be indexed, and if it also contains useful links, those links are likely to remain.

With my syndicated content I allow modifications, thus if someone chose to add nofollow to any links to an advertiser that would be their choice in an editorial capacity - it is pure editorial, I wouldn't suggest paying someone to syndicate my content.

There are a few extra possibilites I haven't yet discussed, but I need to get those more formalized before writing about them.

p.s. for some reason the comment system was rejecting "Andy Beard"

The only loophole in this loophole is that if Google follows Disallow as it should then the page would actually be removed completely from the index.  Not to mention your robots.txt makes for a good read to see where your paid reviews are...