Foreign Perspectives

I think that the underlying problem is that the origins of google’s algorithm are effectively an automated way to rank things similar to academic articles. There you never had the problem of people paying for references (ie links), or at least not quite so openly (the final couple of authors on papers are often there just so that they can get a “publication”).

Move on 10 years and, yes, money does come into it. Just ignoring paid links isn’t sensible in an Internet which is, these days, largely commercial.

Adding “nofollow” in attempt to effectively negate advertising does not seem to be a sensible way to go. This action on their part is just going to push it “underground”. Chances are that you’ll see more blogs put out by companies with very subliminal type advertising. It’s still advertising though and it’s still going to distort the results in google’s algorithm.

What they really need to do is to allow for advertising in terms of paid links. Just putting their head in the sand isn’t going to be a long term solution to this yet that’s exactly what they appear to be doing at the moment.

Come on guys: update the algorithm to allow for a commercial Internet.