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Comment by gojomo | Hacker News Reader

With apologies to Sigmund Freud:

Google forbids us to sell links not because it wishes to do away with linkselling, but because it wishes to monopolize it.

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Google has no problem with link selling--Google has a problem with PageRank selling. Sell all the links you want, just use nofollow.

If someone wants to buy a link but isn't interested in only receiving the traffic it brings (and not any pagerank), they are probably up to no good anyway.

I just checked the paid links on Google's search page. They do not use nofollow. This fact, combined with your arguments, is consistent with gojomo's hypothesis about Google wanting to monopolize paid links.

Google's search results page blocks all crawlers (including Google) using robots.txt, so it's a moot point. Nofollow's only relevant when a page might appear in a search engine.

And isn't that convenient? Google's main kind of link-selling is unaffected by their rules, but other kinds of link-selling is disadvantaged. ("Use a standard we invented to make our job easier, or risk being frozen out of 70%+ of all search traffic.")

And similarly: "We crawl your stuff; but our search results are off-limits." Of course, anyone can block Google, but given the asymmetry in business models and market power that's not much of an equalizing factor.

I like Google and think they mean well. Individually each of these policies has a reasonable basis. But Google is now so dominant -- and the positive financial rewards they get from self-serving policies so large -- that their actions deserve close scrutiny.

(The Freud-inspired quote I led with was originally about the state; Google's influence on the net is so large that they are a lot like the net's government.)

Exactly, that's why they had to act on Text Link Ads both the paid links and the company. Many web publishers used that instead of Google Ads.

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