Want an Editorially Approved Link Become a Google Partner
Posted on January 8th, 2008by Michael Gray in Google
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in this mornings post I chastised Google for giving straight links to partners, However now I’ve found a whole bunch more
Here’s a Google adwords customer Happy Hounds getting an editorially approved link from Google, lets not forget twiddy.com or cordarounds.com not to worry while they may keep other robots out but they let googlebot in in robots.txt (that was close they almost complied with their own guidelines on that one)
here’s a bunch more from Google Checkout.
and here’s some from Google analytics you have to click the merchants name but the link for “learn more on their site” looks clean to me.
Don’t worry askthebuilder on Google adsense we didn’t forget that you are giving out editorially approved links too
Matt Cutts commented that some of the links in the first post were Ok because they were editorially given. However it seems google is pretty loose with links being editorially given with their partners
Maybe linkbrokers just need to start rebranding themselves as “editorial link partners” for 2008 
January 8th, 2008 at 8:01 pm
ha! you are relentless and I love it.
January 8th, 2008 at 8:05 pm
I’d believe the editorial slant if they linked to someone who wasn’t a customer or a big spender on the same page. It’s editorial, as long as you spend a bunch of money, which to me sounds a heck of lot like a paid link.
January 8th, 2008 at 9:00 pm
I don’t think that you’re being reasonable here. Clearly, the business relationship extends *far* beyond the value of that link to Google. When you’re featuring a relationship worth millions of revenue a year, in the hopes of persuading other prospects reading the case study to sign up and start spending millions, the PRwhatever link is just like the complimentary chocolate you get when you stay in the Presidential Suite at a five star hotel. Nobody is making a decision on the basis of that chocolate.
On the other hand, http://www.chocolate-link-ads.com sells the chocolate, and only the chocolate, not a business relationship except to the extent that exchanging chocolate for money is a business relationship.
Full disclosure: I worked with Google on a case study for Conversion Optimizer and my business. It isn’t published yet. I certainly wouldn’t mind getting a link out of it, but that wasn’t the primary motivation for working with them on the case study.
January 8th, 2008 at 9:02 pm
JLH, if you go visit the Google blog we do a ton of editorial links, e.g. the American Economic Association, vanderbilt.edu, msn.com — those are just in the most recent post right now. Likewise if you just click around on Google for a bit you’ll find editorial links on pages like http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/software_principles.html with three links to Spybot Search and Destroy, LavaSoft’s Ad-aware, and CWShredder. Those links are all editorial and not partners.
January 8th, 2008 at 9:15 pm
@patrick
however if we apply the google litmus test of “would this link have been given if there was no financial bond” how many of those pass the test
January 8th, 2008 at 9:41 pm
Hi Matt. I don’t doubt that there are a few editorial links on Google’s domains, just like not all blogs that sell links don’t also have a few editorial links on them. Note that I said, “on the same page”. To even be considered for the editorial process on those pages one needs to be a partner, thus the connection Michael has made between paid links and Google’s own pages.
It is indeed a slippery slope when we try to divine intent.
January 8th, 2008 at 9:52 pm
@jlh maybe they are throwing those in to “look natural” and offset all the paid … err partner links
January 9th, 2008 at 1:29 am
“editorial link partners†for 2008
LOL best new way to describe paid links yet!
January 9th, 2008 at 5:57 am
@Matt: I think you’re missing the point, which is that Google is cheerfully helping its partners out with links which presumably drive significant traffic on their own, not mentioning the positive effect those high-PageRank links would create in the SERPs.
As Michael quite rightly points out, this is not consistent with the information currently coming from Google about commercially motivated links. The impression it puts across is one rule for the rest of the Internet and another (more relaxed) rule for Google.
As a publisher - one who hosed Text Links based on all this - it makes me very uneasy about the perceived morphing of Google from a company which levelled the playing field for small publishers and stores to one which is becoming a faceless megacorp(tm). Can I suggest that the time is right to retire PageRank and the little green bar which caused this mess in the first place? Maybe then webmasters will move toward more reliable metrics to determine the success of their sites.
January 9th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
Hmmm, welp, just to throw some light - our canalytics link on the partners page you linked to was not paid for. We didn’t pay a cent to become partners, and in fact I drank a lot of their fancy juice when at the googleplex, so really it cost them money.
Getting on that partners page isn’t easy… used to be harder, but still isn’t easy. Google checks references pretty thoroughly. I would say though that parnters page, if viewed algorithmically, probably looks like a list of paid links. Maybe google hasn’t spidered itself in a while.
-Naoise
January 9th, 2008 at 6:21 pm
Something else I notice though, is that Google.com never appears in the backlinks for any of their outbound links — so far as I’ve noticed. Maybe I’m wrong, but it appears as if they aren’t passing any juice at all, at least not any Google-juice.
@Naoise — But careful, if Google were to give out serious link-love, those sites may not need to spend the hundreds and thousands of dollars in AdWords every month, so it’s actually in Google’s best interest to not give the link-love.
January 10th, 2008 at 6:44 pm
@ JLH: “It is indeed a slippery slope when we try to divine intent.”
How true that is.
January 11th, 2008 at 9:48 pm
Intent isn’t so difficult to divine when you run a link audit on link buyers. Some buyers leave a big trace behind them that screams “spammer.” Again, it boils down to a guessing game, but sometimes machines can connect the dots better than people. For example, you can feign innocence till your face turns blue, but if you have 10,000 TLA links and 100 PPP links pointing at your domain, its pretty much a closed and shut case. If the pattern a webmaster leaves isn’t so obvious, Google can look for a bigger fish to fry.
Right now, I doubt Google is even interested in gray areas, but if the SEO community keeps this up, Google will be forced to clamp down on gray area paid links just to avoid looking inconsistent. In that case, SEOs will have dug their own graves.
January 12th, 2008 at 1:29 am
@halfdeck sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between a bad SEO and a creative and aggressive saboteur
January 12th, 2008 at 11:13 pm
“sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference”
Yeah, if it wasn’t hard, Google would be banning link buyers left and right. But people do get careless.
“I got a serious question for you: What the fuck are you doing? This is not shit for you to be messin’ with. Are you ready to hear something? I want you to see if this sounds familiar: any time you try a decent crime, you got fifty ways you’re gonna fuck up. If you think of twenty-five of them, then you’re a genius… and you ain’t no genius. You remember who told me that?”
- Micky Rourke, Body Heat
Remember Matt pointing out how some site owners carelessly stamp their link injections with their IP addys? Claiming innocence in cases likes that just makes them bad liars.