Evil Jeremy Part 2
December 13, 2005
One of the things about blogging I haven’t yet come to grips with is the idea that anyone other than my 10 drinking buddies will be reading what I write. When discussing search with the brew crew, I always have the luxury of knowing everyone present has a good understanding of where I stand on all the major issues. That being the case, I never have had any problems with someone leaving the table completely clueless about a point I was trying to make.
I now understand (thanks john) that I need to be a bit more obvious here on the blog, so let me lay out in great detail where I stand on the subject of paid links.
(Everyone accept John can skip the first two)
- 1. It’s WebGuerrilla, not Web Guerilla.
2. It’s Zawodny, not Zawodney.
3. I don’t think Jeremy is a bad guy for selling links.
4. He’s worked very hard on his site. He deserves to earn some money from it.
5. I heard about Jeremy selling links from his broker.
6. His broker is also my broker. That means I buy links.
7. Our mutual broker is a stand-up guy, and a great entrepreneur.
8. I’m tired of people talking about our broker like he’s a criminal.
9. I said that search engines consider paid links a problem.
10. I never said I agreed with them.
11. I believe that the nofollow attribute is a tool that gives webmasters the option of telling an engine not to trust a link.
12. Jeremy reviewed the sites and then decided that they were trustworthy.
13. I trust his judgment. So should the search engines.
14. I hope he keeps the links up condom free.
And finally..
15. I think it is sad and pathetic that any search engine has to run around threatening site owners in order to get them to conform to their idea of what sites should or shouldn’t be trusted.
I hope that clears everything up. Now lets move on.
Update: Matt has responded to JeremyGate. It turns out Jeremy is three clicks away from lesbian porn. Hopefully, Matt will do the right thing and add nofollow to his link to Jeremy’s site. I would hate to see him get penalized for linking to a bad neighborhood.
Comments
11 Responses to “Evil Jeremy Part 2”
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hey Greg great list! I completely agree that 15 should be in bold red. Matt summarizes G’s thoughts on the subject as being “Sites that sell links can lose their trust in search engines.” This to me is the epitome of the “pot calling the kettle black.” Google goes through a qualification process before allowing a site to post links for search engine queries (OK let’s not get into eBay bidding for the term “young girls), shouldn’t they expect that many site owners will go through a similar process, with the intent of providing only links that can be of benefit to their visitors? If the links that are sold are somehow relevant to the site, in my opinion, this should make it “fair game.”
Thanks again, and I look forward to learning more from you in New York next year! CB
Thanks for the clarification Greg. I too agree that #15 should be bolded.
John
Nah,
anyone reading the tone of your previous post can see you now back-pedal plenty in light of a bit of fellow-SEO scoldings.
jake
My blog is only a few weeks old and I am #1 for the phrase “Google Sitemap Exploit” and 3rd for “Google Security Failures” in Google. See where I am going with this? It is people like Greg who keep Google from going too far. Yes he is upset about paid links being devalued BUT this is not important now.
If click fraud really exists Google needs to deal with this or they will lose all credibility.
If there are still splogs making Google money this needs to be dealt with or Google will lose all credibility.
Today I found a splog on water gardens that has PR; it also has adsense on it. I know my water garden site was massively scraped by these people but they are still getting PR and will be my future competition??? Imagine that, I am the originator of the articles on water gardens and I will be competing against someone who mixed up my text in articlebot? Wonderful!
Do not be afraid to speak your mind.
Sad and pathetic though they may be, by my calculations Matt’s blog is the most read in the SEO sphere right now… That tells me that a lot of people are going to be intimidated into following the rules… Leaving lots of beautiful, low demand links for the rest of us to buy at cut-rate prices.
See, Matt’s just trying to save us money, Greg.
Wow - three clicks away from porn? If IBM is to be believed, that’s 30% of all internet traffic.
If small world theory applies to the net, then he’s just 3 clicks more further from any other website in the world.
By the way, didn’t Matt mention DMOZ as a trusted source? Anyone ever counted how big their porn section is? Does this mean that being listed in DMOZ - 2 clicks from porn - makes it a bad neighbourhood?
Good observation randfish. I also think this will be a huge benefit to parts of the link industry in the long run. Instead of people going out and buying the “obvious� links with a few simple clicks they will pay others to find them “better� high-quality links.
Hi Greg,
Don’t pull any punches or pay too much attention to people you are not necessarily targeting with your articles. You will never be able to please everyone so don’t bother trying.
No. Enlighten me.
[…] I was going to do a post on my feelings on renting links as a follow up to my post on the importance of linking. However, I think that Greg Boser, aka WebGuerrilla, pretty much sums up exactly how I feel about the issue of paid links. […]
AdSense is the market leader for paid text links, Google has the power to undermine its competitors’ business in this market by hiding their sites away from the searching public, and they do so by disseminating FUD.
Surprise, surprise!