Screw your competitors. Google will help you.
As Google ponders how to apply relevance where relevance is now for sale and barter, they have stepped up and fired their first salvo: Dinging the Page Rank of link farms and sites which promote heavy cross-linking activity.
Situationally, they’re in a can of worms here. For their strategy to be effective, they’d really need to check sites by hand to decide if they should be put on their demotion list. On the flip side, if they do nothing at all, the burgeoning text link ad business will run amok, adding false positives to Google’s view of all things meta.
What to do, Google… what to do. Clearly this is the safe route, and one that is hard to challenge at face value: Kick the link farms in the stomach. But, many sites of a different caliber have reported negative repercussions (read the SEOmoz article below). Forbes? The Washington Post? I had heard rumors that there were a good number of highly respected sites that have stealth pages (that users never see) where they sell text links for top dollar. Maybe it is true.
Regardless, Google policing in this manner when looked at from a slightly different perspective is unsettling. Want to get a leg up on your competition? Buy them a nice present. Hook them up with involvement in some highly visible link farms. Get them some text link ads from a really visible source, too. Google will help you screw them over.
Read more on TechCrunch:
Google Declares Jihad On Blog Link Farms
SEOmoz is also providing commentary and the effect on more mainstream web sites:
Google Toolbar PageRank Losses For Hundreds of Websites
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