W3C sells PageRank to Viagra pages

Are you running an Internet shop that offers Viagra-pills or an equivalent, and you wish to improve your search engine rankings? No problem! At W3C anyone may buy text links from a webpage with a Google PageRank of 8!

By giving a 2500 USD donation to W3C, you will in return receive the title Major Supporter and a link with text of your choice for your webpage on the W3C Supporters Program page, a webpage which has a Google PageRank of 8 – and even better, this link does not contain a nofollow-attribute. Therefore, this PageRank may be transmitted to your own site.

W3C Search Engine Spam

This has been discovered by quite some people, and the W3C page referred to, consists of a mishmash of links to more or less flippant benefactors such as web shops that sell Viagra-pills and worse. Here are some of W3C's links:

Generic Viagra, Best Buy Generic Cialis, Hair Loss Treatment, diet pills, Coupons Online, Online Pharmacy, Buy Generic Cialis Tadalafil, diet pills, Online Dating, GetResponse – Email Marketing Software, Russian SMS Billing, Buy generic viagra cialis, Cheap Car Insurance, Weight Loss Pills, Best Diet Pills.

Irresponsible of W3C?

What's wrong about this, you may ask? What happens when W3C posts web-links from a site that has such a soaringly high Google PageRank, is that much of the PageRank is transferred to the webpages that are linked to, and as a direct result of this, these webpages receive higher ranking in search engines, such as Google.

The linking is not done to the benefit of the W3C's visitors, but solely because these links have been bought and paid for, and this is exactly what makes this so wrong – because that is altogether what search engines are programmed to believe. Links from one webpage to another are, in fact, interpreted as recommendations of the sites linked to.

From my point of view, this is poor practice by W3C, and it is both irresponsible and flippant of them. Is W3C doing so poorly that they have to resort to PageRank as bait to increase donations?

The people in charge at W3C should perhaps read the following article by Google-employee Matt Cutts: Text links and PageRank, here he makes references to the following quote from Google Webmaster Guidelines: «Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank.»

Paid linking should be marked as nofollow, and if W3C had done this on their Supporter Program page, everything would be just fine – instead they contribute to glib web-sites with questionable content in order to get a high rank in search results at Google and other search engines. Aren't there any others out there who react to this practice?

4 svar

So why link to those sites, even with nofollow?

Postet av bjorn – 20.11.2008 @ 14:17

grr – code did not get through – trying again
meta name="ROBOTS" content="INDEX, NOFOLLOW"
is in the head – do a view source
So there is a "nofollow"

Postet av Anonymous – 21.11.2008 @ 00:12

So why link to those sites, even with nofollow?

If i´m not to "off" here he asked why Asle linked to the sites even if he used nofollow.

When it comes to "nofollow" or not, there is always a chance that some search- engines don't honor it and follows anyway.

Anyway. It's a well known fact that spammers love to exploit all possibilities to make someone a fool, and this is only one of them. AFAIK W3C should never have given them this opportunity at all.

Postet av Kyrre Baker – 21.11.2008 @ 00:20

Anonymous: This is a translation of a Norwegian article wich i wrote in July 2006 (Uansvarlig av W3C?) – at that time W3C did not have a nofollow in the head (Wayback Machine, Jul 21, 2006). I failed to see that they have added the meta name afterwards. Sorry!

Postet av Asle Ommundsen – 21.11.2008 @ 09:42

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