My never ending WP 2.6 Thread...

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#21

Re: My never ending WP 2.6 Thread…

[quote=rawTOP;18923]Is keeping them away from something they have said they don’t want to see “cloaking”? Not really…

“Cloaking” is allowed to reduce duplicate content because duplicate content messes them up. Hence when you have links that do things like changing the number of products shown in a product list, you’re allowed to “cloak” those URLs to reduce the amount of duplicate content googlebot has to deal with.

Google has said they do not want to see “paid links” - that if they exist, they should be “nofollowed”. What I’m doing is keeping them away from something they’ve said they don’t want to see and redirecting them to pages on the same exact topic. I’m only using a 301 when the topic is identical. So, “Join HotBarebacking.com” would go to the page on my site that is all about HotBarebacking.com.

True, it’s not pure white hat, but it’s not black hat either… It’s more light gray hat…

[I should mention that Google doesn’t like to admit that their definition of cloaking covers things they allow - like duplicate content reduction. But it does. To them the term cloaking is only bad - there are no good forms of cloaking… But the real world is different. Rand Fishkin had a good post on it a couple weeks ago and it brought the whole issue up and Matt Cutts was in the discussion - pretty interesting…][/quote]

True, the spirit is keeping things away they don’t want to see, but I just don’t feel like its a comfortable solution to give them a page while giving the surfer a different one. Would come awful close to the 2nd definition of Cloaking to make it scary enough to be cautious.

If the ‘nofollow’ and ‘robots’ work, why serve them a different page?

And too, if you are redirecting them to a more authoritive page, or one that is relevent to the link, that alone would make me wary of the site… from a Google perspective, as if you are trying to garner better SE position, by hiding the true link… paid or not. Seems a bit more than light grey, imho. even though the ‘intent’ isn’t, as you say but G isn’t going to know that.

#22

Re: My never ending WP 2.6 Thread…

[QUOTE=Gaystoryman;18926]True, the spirit is keeping things away they don’t want to see, but I just don’t feel like its a comfortable solution to give them a page while giving the surfer a different one. Would come awful close to the 2nd definition of Cloaking to make it scary enough to be cautious.

If the ‘nofollow’ and ‘robots’ work, why serve them a different page?

And too, if you are redirecting them to a more authoritive page, or one that is relevent to the link, that alone would make me wary of the site… from a Google perspective, as if you are trying to garner better SE position, by hiding the true link… paid or not. Seems a bit more than light grey, imho. even though the ‘intent’ isn’t, as you say but G isn’t going to know that.[/QUOTE]

I wouldn’t call the pay site an authoritative page… lol

Nofollow tells them too much about your site. If they know the primary purpose is affiliate links there’s a good chance they’ll think less of your site. It also tells them you’re SEO-aware so they’ll start looking for ways in which you’re gaming the system (though the same could be said for a redirect script).

Robots.txt is perhaps the most white hat way to go, but then you have a lot of link juice accumulating in blocked URLs…

It’s a hard thing to argue… I’d say I’m revealing to them the nature of the link while keeping them away from affiliate pages they don’t want to see. But I get the other side of the argument as well…

The question is what to do with link exchanges like the one for GD Dicktionary… They say they don’t like link exchange networks either. I’m tempted to do a 302 on those and let them follow it…

#23

Re: My never ending WP 2.6 Thread…

I thought you were redirecting the spiders to pages on your own site, not to a paysite :rolleyes:

I’ll let bots crawl it but redirect the bots to category pages on my site appropriate to the outbound link

Yes the recip links from GD Dictionary could be difficult, but if the pages linking together are on the same topic, it shouldn’t really be classed as a link farm or link scheme. Its sites with similar content linking. While G does seem to depreciate return links, I don’t see it being a huge problem with the Dictionary at GD, unless the links are on some link page, or plastered all over on irrelevant pages.

#24

Re: My never ending WP 2.6 Thread…

I am. What made you think I wasn’t? Let me rephrase… Let’s say I have a link saying “Join Felch That Hole Now!” - the users would go to the pay site, the spiders would go to the page on my site that has my posts about FelchThatHole.com.

Actually, GD uses robots.txt to block spiders from outbound links. So there isn’t a reciprocal link issue… But there might be issues with reciprocal links to other sites that aren’t as well managed… Since GD blocks spiders from seeing the link to my site I don’t feel obligated to return a spiderable link, though the 302 to GD is more truthful than a 301 to a page on my site and won’t pass link juice, so I might do that too…

Maybe what got you confused is that on a link by link basis I can link out or link in using either a 301 or 302…