By David Maillie

In recent weeks a lot has been going on in the Google search world.  Google has made an adjustment to their algorithms and this has lowered some of the importance of certain links.  Thay have also made it known that they are actively pursuing those people that buy and sell links for the sole purpose of search engine ranking manipulation. 

Matt Cutts, the head search spam guru at Google, has stated on his blog that paid links are okay in the form of advertising and they should be labeled as such and not pass pagerank or authority.  To do this links should include the No Follow tag as shown below:

<a href='http://www.domain.com' originalAttribute="href" originalPath="'http://www.domain.com'" originalAttribute="href" originalPath="'http://www.domain.com'" originalAttribute="href" originalPath="'http://www.domain.com'" originalAttribute="href" originalPath="'http://www.domain.com'" rel='nofollow'>key word</a>

By including the No Follow tag, the link is advertising and would not incur a penalty if found by Google.  Apparently Aaron Wall, the founder of the SEO ebook that is popularly sold all over the world through affiliate websites and the like, is quite mad at Google for these changes.  Matt Cutts states in his blog that he isn't sure if he wants to address Mr. Wall's ranting about Google.  Why is Aaron Wall upset?  Because the No Follow tag and eradicating paid links makes SEO and his ebook almost a thing of the past. 

Without paid links, you don't really need SEO.  Just write good, unique content and that is what searchers are craving and Google wants.  Who wants spam sites or poor ecommerce sites showing up as number one in seach results.  That just makes the search of poorer quality and the searcher is then likely to use a different search engine next time.  This is definitely not what Google wants.   

There is a movement adrift right now, which is to shun Google and use the opposite of the no follow tag - the Do Follow tag.  There are even whole websites and groups forming around this that publicly announce that they are only using Do Follow tags.  Some have even made little segments of code or plugins for those using programs like Wordpress where the No Follow tag or command is automatic on any comment. 

I would be very careful of using the do-follow tag.  Google has made targeting these blogs and directories a priority and every day more do-follow blogs have their PR's dropped or entirely removed.  Just look at some of the Do Follow lists already out there.  Every webite on the lists either has a PR 0 or they have enabled comment moderation, comment spam software, or turned off comments altogether.  It also keeps an eye on whom is doing the comment spamming like putting keywords in the name field.  Google knows that most websites and users that associate with do-follow blogs or websites and directories have a much greater chance of being involved in spam or some similar activity.  By targeting these do follow sites they can quickly eradicate a large portion of the link spam and comment spam (just as they are doing now with malware and other things).

Basically if you use these websites you are wearing a large bulls eye on your head for Google to know you are most likely a spammer.  Why on earth would you want to do that and risk your PR, rankings and traffic?

Basically, if you really look into it, the way it works is that a no-follow does not remove all page rank or authority of a link.  What it does is lower the weight it had.  So, if you managed to get a link from a PR 8 site it will still help your site.  It just won't take a PR 0 site and make it a PR 4 or 5 over night anymore.  Google also looks at other things like is the link natural.  Does it have supporting content?  Are there many links on that page?  Do other links have that no-follow also?  This is why Google is asking for users to report web spam and paid links to make the search better for everyone.

Every time Google makes a change there is some fallout.  And there is some of that going on right now, but I also believe there will be a rollback or lessening of the last change as it was too severe and there are a lot of searches now that come up with spam results that shouldn't be there or at least not in the top 10 results.

Some time in the near future there will also be social search on Google.  Google is hinting at this now with their new rollout of personal search that you can fix or alter to put websites and results you like better at the top and remove or delete results you don't care for or think that are poor.   I don't know how they will monitor that and stop spammers from socially engineering and conspiring with their friends to make their websites rank higher. But I guess we will see.