Handsome Logic

Google has come under fire on more than one occasion for providing non-nofollow links to partners, despite their own crusade against paid links. Most notably, a post on the Google Checkout Blog highlighted Google Checkout merchant GolfBalls.com with a direct link to their website using valuable anchor text:

Google was taken to task over this by Michael Gray, Aaron Wall and others.

Why?

Google acknowledges that purchasing links as an advertising strategy is a natural part of web economics. According to Google, any sponsored links should be identified through the use of the rel=”nofollow” tag to remove the link’s ability to pass authority.

The controversy stems from the fact that they often provide links to Google Checkout merchants, Google Analytics users, and other partners without using the rel=”nofollow” tag. Hypocrisy to be sure.

But do Google’s own outbound links actually pass authority?

In looking through Google’s official blogs and their outbound links, I came up with a few theories and examples which suggest they do NOT…

Theory #1: Google Checkout’s “Places to Shop” links do not pass authority

Google Checkout maintains a Places to Shop page that serves as a directory of their merchants. The image links at the top of the page are just regular HTML, but all text links are javascript pulled from a Google Spreadsheets document:

<script type=”text/javascript” charset=”utf-8″>
document.getElementById(’stores’).innerHTML = ‘<p style=”color: #666;”><b>Loading the list of Google Checkout stores…</b></p>’;
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/list/o13419680420574654320.
1842429693010805565/od6/public/basic?alt=json-in-script&callback=
listMerchants”></script>
<script type=”text/javascript” charset=”utf-8″>
if (document.getElementById(’message’)) document.getElementById(’message’).innerHTML = ‘The store list is currently being updated. Please check back in a few minutes.’;
</script>

These links could have been published just as easily without using Javascript. Most of these links are either the name or domain name of the site, but using the ones that are not, we can see that these links are passing no value (if even being crawled at all).

Example 1: The link for “CSN Stores” goes to http://www.luggage.com/asp/partners.asp, but a Google search for “CSN Stores” does not return that luggage.com page anywhere in the first 100 results.

Example 2: The link for “Mystic Sales” points to http://www.skinmystique.com/ but again, a Google search for the phrase “Mystic Sales” does not return SkinMystique.com in the first 100 results.

Both of these pages are indexed, and neither of these are competitive search terms. Does it many any sense that an inbound link from a PR8 page wouldn’t even put these two sites on the map for these terms? Not unless no juice is flowing or the links aren’t being crawled at all.

This suggests that Google has deliberately removed their own page’s ability to pass link value by using Javascript for these links.

This raises the question on whether or not the outbound links on the Google Checkout Success Stories page are passing value. Since they all use either the company name or the site’s domain as the anchor text, it’s anybody’s guess.

Theory #2: Golfballs.com’s link is weak or discounted

The link on the Google Checkout blog to Golfballs.com uses the anchor text “Titleist Pro V1 Golf Balls” to link to an interior product page. However, this page ranks LOWER in Google for that exact phrase than any of the other 11 “Pro Shop Featured Product” detail pages on Golfballs.com

Of all 12 product detail pages linked to from their “Pro Shop Featured Products” page, the one receiving a direct link from a PR6 page on Google’s own PR7 blog ranks the LOWEST. They’re barely outranking findarticles.com.

Does THAT make any sense? Not unless no link juice is flowing.

Theory #3: The Google Checkout blog passes link value only to Google sites

Outbound links on the Google Checkout blog (and probably other official Google blogs) to other Google pages DO pass value.

Example 1: Last month, a post on the Google Checkout blog used the anchor text “holiday page” to link to http://www.google.com/checkout/promotions/donations.html

That page now ranks #3 for a search on “holiday page”. With almost no content, and the word “holiday” only mentioned 3 times total, the page ranks #3 out of over 41 million results.

Now because the blog’s content gets republished, there ARE a few other sites out there linking to this page with that anchor text. None nearly as powerful as the original link though.

Example 2: In a post from October, the Google Checkout blog uses the anchor text “summer promo” to link out to http://www.google.co.uk/checkout/promotions.html

That page also ranks #3 for a search on “summer promo“. Not a hugely competitive term, but the page that is ranking doesn’t say “summer” or “promo” anywhere on it, and is actually a page about Christmas shopping.

Some other searches that return Google pages inflated by the anchor text of links from Google blogs include…

-”data feed of products” #2 out of over 7 million results

-”recent survey” #6 out of over 18 million results

Why not take credit?

If Google is now (or has always been) discounting the value of their own outbound links without the use of rel=”nofollow”, why would they not take credit for it?

1. Using a rel=”nofollow” tag to link out to one of their own customers/partners would indicate that either A.) Google is not comfortable vouching for their own merchant partners, or B.) these partners actually purchased a link from Google.

2. Swiss army cat skinner (oh I can’t wait to rank for that). What’s that mean? Well, since Google makes the rules, they have plenty of ways to abide by them.

Some of these, like manually discounting their own outbound links without use of nofollow tags, are not available to webmasters. In other instances, like in the link to eMarketer found on the Inside Adwords blog, Google simply filters the link through their own url redirector (http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=http://www.anysite.com).

3. Lastly, to suddenly add rel=”nofollow” tags to these links could easily be seen as Google buckling under the weight of critical industry bloggers. This is probably the least significant reason, though no less valid. Google can not afford to admit fault, especially to people who vehemently oppose their own paid link policies.

Conclusion

Of course these are only theories, and do not prove that Google’s official blogs do not pass outbound link value to non-Google pages. The fact that Google Checkout’s “Places to Shop” page doesn’t pass juice to the majority of its outbound links is easily explained by their use of Javascript.

The question is, why did they use Javascript for the text links? Why didn’t they use HTML for the whole page? Why didn’t they use Javascript for the whole page?

Why is their most publicized “sold” link to Golfballs.com barely getting that page into the top 10 SERPs, while nearly irrelevant Google pages soar to top spots for anchor text used on Official Google blogs?

Curious indeed.