In Matt Cutts most recent vendetta against (oh please let me participate to the whole dramatization of the Google = Evil policy) paid links we often tend to forget how easy Google bots can nowadays recognize many (paid) links. I will not go into detail, but would rather love to see you use that gray mass, AKA your brain.
Just think about semantics.
How many links you sell are in sidebar or footers, nicely inside a class footer, sidebar or secondary. I bet it must be really hard for bots to recognize that structure and devaluate the value of those links.
2 have made me smarter ↓
1 Stancje // Jun 27, 2007 at 4:54 pm// View all comments by Stancje//
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Hello
It is impossible, that google will recognize which links are in footer and which in header…we can simply put links in the begining of our page and by CSS styles make them appear at bottom page.
I also cant belive thath google will fight with paid links for example yahoo dir and 300$ year payment…
2 Franky // Jun 27, 2007 at 6:26 pm// View all comments by Franky//
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Stancje, the point is not how well you master CSS and placement, but the critical factor in this observation is the semantic web. I can think of many popular (free) themes for blogs using perfectly recognizable div names. I also use semantic classes, and worse even I use Microtags, which makes recognition even easier. Just think about how many designers use classes such as content, sidebar, footer, primary, secondary, entry aso.
According to the code, the comment block belongs above the live preview here. The entry was merely about semantics, not about CSS. ;-)