Oh, yeah… saw that coming

V7N has decided to tag people and demand that they pay him if they want him not to link to them. It’s a joke based on Michael Gray’s Paid Blog Link Meme in which he links to Matt Cutts and others and claims they paid him for those links. Which is based on the unfortunate non-joke that Google wants to discount paid links.

At least now they are being slightly clearer about that: paid links will not get you banned. They will be discounted. In fact, they already are being discounted, if they’ve been detected by algorithms. The only thing that actually changed is they’re asking people to tattle, and using the tattling both to start investigations and to tweak the algo to do a better job of detecting them.

On my own sites, nothing’s changed. My guess is that my paid links had already been detected. They could be the reason I lost a point of PR on several sites in this latest update. On the other hand, I’ve lost PR before and had no idea why. But - and this is important - despite the PR loss my traffic is still steadily increasing just like always.

And yeah, Google is sending the same traffic as always. A bit more each month.

So what’s the big deal here?