Dan Thies on Paid Links, Google & FTC
Posted on | September 11, 2007 |
Dan Thies has written a great article illustrating the holes in Google’s plan to make webmasters use NoFollows on all paid advertisements.
Here are some clips:
By relying on past FTC statements (on advertising disclosure) Google further weakens their case. If advertising must be disclosed as such (this is why the FTC would weigh in), then Google’s nofollow plan won’t work, because nofollow does not (and can not) explicitly mean “this is an ad.”
After all, the FTC isn’t going to give a rat’s tail about the effect of paid links on Google’s organic results. Or at least, Google had better hope so, because if the FTC decided that organic listings are a form of advertising, that would put all of the search engines onto a very slippery slope.
Read the full article on Paid Links, Google and FTC
When NoFollows were first utilized in 2005 Google wrote this:
Q: What types of links should get this attribute?
A: We encourage you to use the rel=”nofollow” attribute anywhere that users can add links by themselves, including within comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists. Comment areas receive the most attention, but securing every location where someone can add a link is the way to keep spammers at bay.
Does that mean advertisers are now spammers?
Found via Sphinn.com
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Justilien Gaspard is a SEO/M consultant with over 7 years experience in organic search marketing. Professionally he’s a columnist for Search Engine Watch, speaker at SES Conferences and has authored 3 advanced courses for SEMPO Institute. Learn more about Justilien.
September 11th, 2007 @ 3:58 pm
Nofollow made so much more sense in 2005, didn’t it? :D
September 12th, 2007 @ 7:51 am
That it did! Yet well knew it would evolve. =)