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Who Says Google doesn’t Practice Black Hat.
By Gary Thomas | August 14, 2007
I recently came across an article on SEObook.com “Google Caught Selling High PageRank Links, Again & Again” by Aaron Wall. It talks about Google buying market shares for their checkout and profiling their members and giving them free links from a higher Google PageRank sites.
Google is buying marketshare for Google Checkout by profiling merchants who use it, and giving them free high PageRank links from Google sites.
The Google Checkout blog, currently a PageRank 8 site, recently posted about the success of GolfBalls.com on their blog. Not only does that post provide direct links, one one of the links is a deep link with targeted anchor text.
However, is it considered black hat when the conductor is doing it? I would have to agree with Aaron on this one.
If Google does something like that it is a co-brand cross promotion, and all is well. If I do something like that it is an attempt to manipulate Google and/or a spammy link buy.
You know Google would have a fit if we were trying this technique. Google should be a little more careful if they want to stay king of the hill. Google wants us to practice good search engine marketing ethics, which they get to define. Then they steer their own ship and this direction and expect us not to follow. Remember Google, every leader eventually loses it reign. Until then, I guess it’s that old saying that I always heard as a kid, “do as I say, not as I do.”
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August 15th, 2007 at 12:45 pm
I agree with one of the posts over at seobook who says we do not know how Google handles PageRank flow from Gooogle properties. Heck, we don’t even know how it flows anywhere.
I like your logo by the way. Reminds me of Leon Redbone…but he wore a white hat, come to think of it.
August 16th, 2007 at 9:05 am
I think it’s quite presumptuous on Aaron Wall’s part to assume anything, but even if it is true, Google is still a business. At the end of the day, Google is a money-making venture and in order to be successful on all fronts, they use all of their properties to promote it’s less successful properties.
Companies use the dreaded “synergy” term to cross-promote everything and anything on all fronts.
August 30th, 2007 at 3:53 pm
Google is just out to make money and be the best it can be.
October 7th, 2007 at 5:10 pm
The biggest fear of mine is that what google defines as wrong is not black or white. It is subjective. It leads to confusion for those (myself included) who don’t read googles blogs all the time to find out what they are currently defining as “bad” practice.