Are You A Google link narc - Do You Know One
Posted in Search Marketing by jspirko on July 12th, 2007 
Wikipedia (who sucks, practices nofollow and considers all SEO's spammers and therefore does not get any links from me) defines a narc as "A narc is a person who notifies authorities of illicit activity, betraying someone in the process". Now this is why I call anyone that would notify Google that they have found paid or sponsored links that are not using the rel="nofollow" attribute a NARC.
"a person who notifies authorities, betraying someone in the process"
To me anyone traveling the web looking for such things and then reporting back to Google can only be described as a "link narc". Oh and make no mistake if you are this type of person Google LOVES you, they want to communicate with you and they want to make it easy for you to rat on fellow marketers who are GASP!, buying links.
Check out their blatant solicitation for rat finks that will sell each other out, Google Webmaster Post - More ways for you to give us input
Nice title? They should have called it, "Webmasters, help us by narcing on your fellow webmasters". They want to make it nice and convenient so they provide a nice form so you can report, "sites buying and selling links for purposes of search engine manipulation". In other words because they have an algorithm that has huge short commings, an algorithm that largely ignores on page content they want to you to narc out other site owners for buying links.
Now if you want to sell or buy links that is OK according to Google, just use rel="nofollow", from the Google post,
"If you are selling links for advertising purposes, there are many ways you can designate this, including:
* Adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to the href tag
* Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file"
So once again why is this, like I said yesterday because I can get a page with nothing on it at all about "kangaroo rats", no pictures, no words, no tags but with enough links pointing to it that say "kangaroo rat" it can rank #1 for the term! So rather then fix their own problems, Google wants to tell us how to manage our sites, the way we should link to others and the terms by which we should do business among ourselves!
Further when any of us dare go against the dictates of Google they want us to narc each other out! To behave like children and tattle on one another!
So here are my questions for you,
- Are you a link narc?
- Would you admit it if you were?
- Do you know a link narc?
- What is you opinion of anyone who would fit the description of a link narc?
- Do you think Google has any business telling webmasters to narc on each other or dictating that we must use nofollow?
I am interested to hear your opinions on this,
~ Jack Spirko
Technorati Tags: link narc, google, goog, buying links, paid links, rel=nofollow, dofollow, buy blog links
Popularity: 11% [?]
Adam_Y said,
July 13, 2007 @ 10:34 am
I’ve just moved all of my comments out of ‘nofollow’ so that the people that participate in my blog/webcomic get a little something in return… but the point you’ve raised is really interesting, that Google wants to fix the internet so that its search engine works rather than the other way round. It’s like changinf physics so that my glass doesn’t fall over rather than just not putting it on the edge of the table.
Like anyone would narc… until they start paying for it anyway.
Teleseminar said,
July 13, 2007 @ 2:16 pm
Wow,
I didn’t know they were doing that! It is rather intrusive of them to tell webmasters how to set up their web sites and do business amongst each other. Well, in the old days before there were really any decent search engines, people got to each other’s sites by using the web, i.e. other people’s websites. They would just go from one site to another.
They still do that, it’s just that it isn’t ans discussed as much anymore.
Also, how can one tell if people are selling links for advertising purposes other than the obvious? Doesn’t it become subjective at some point?
Dubai news said,
July 14, 2007 @ 9:52 am
Very interesting concept here in the google blog:
“Buying or selling links to manipulate results and deceive search engines violates our guidelines.”
We are all cows, people treating google guidelines as Laws of the internet. I can place any link I want on my website and provided I am not breaking any real criminal laws they have to lump it.
This is the bully side of Google, its ugly.
SELaplana said,
July 15, 2007 @ 3:24 am
Actually, I was wondering why google wants us to put the condom on our links to advertisers in our sites or blog. I thought at first Google hates competitors like tla, reviewme, ppp or other third party services who sell links. So Google imposed a policy that links to advertisers should be nofollowed in order to kill them by rendering any SEO value of the links useless.
Gerri said,
July 17, 2007 @ 11:07 am
Wow.. I didn’t know about this. I don’t buy links, but if I did, wouldn’t they be sort of worthless with the nofollow tag? I mean.. that’s why you want links, to increase PR, right? This sure is a crappy Google policy.
Ilya Lichtenstein said,
July 21, 2007 @ 9:04 pm
Isn’t Google’s own AdSense by definition a paid link? Don’t see any nofollow on that…
Webmaster Resources said,
September 12, 2007 @ 10:57 am
I know alot of seos that report paid links to google. Not because they are interested in making google a better search engine but because they are trying to kill competitors.
BTW adsense is javascript based so its not indexed and therefore no need for a nofollow