Tuesday, June 12, 2007
At Google, we are always working hard to provide searchers with the best possible results. We've found that our spam reporting form is a great way to get your input as we continue to improve our results. Some of you have asked for a way to report paid links as well.
Links are an important signal in our PageRank calculations, as they tend to indicate when someone has found a page useful. Links that are purchased are great for advertising and traffic purposes, but aren't useful for PageRank calculations. Buying or selling links to manipulate results and deceive search engines violates our guidelines.
Today, in response to your request, we're providing a paid links reporting form within Webmaster Tools. To use the form, simply log in and provide information on the sites buying and selling links for purposes of search engine manipulation. We'll review each report we get and use this feedback to improve our algorithms and improve our search results. in some cases we may also take individual action on sites.
If you are selling links for advertising purposes, there are many ways you can designate this, including:
- Adding the
nofollowvalue to therelattribute of anatag - Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file
We value your input and look forward to continuing to improve our great partnership with you.