Matt Cutts on Link Brothels

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So one of the more interesting panels at Pubcon was the organic site review with panelists, Tim Mayer, Matt Cutts, Barry Lloyd, Bruce Clay and Baked Jake moderating. In the first part of the session they reviewed bargaintravel.com and Matt recommended they stop interlinking all of their sites together. Later in the session they reviewed lendingtree.com and the footer section caused a bit of a debate

Matt seemed to feel this was ok, at which point I questioned him why is it ok for lending tree to interlink it’s corporate sites but not bargaintravel.com? Matt seemed to feel the intent was different, and added they aren’t helping much anyway. Jake asked how do we know that, and Matt’s reply was “Don’t you trust me“.

From where I sit that’s a perfect example of a link brothel. I don’t care that they are all REAL companies owned by Barry Diller, lets call it what it is A LINK BROTHEL. However I do believe Matt that the links weren’t having an effect. So if you have any link brothels in your page footers, might be time to re-evaluate that tactic.

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