Seo blog - Web design blog

While doing some research I came across and interesting post by Pat McCarthy

While doing some research, an astute coworker of mine noticed that the Google Enterprise Solutions page has links to their partners’ websites who are part of their Enterprise program. What’s interesting about this is that the page has a Google PageRank of 7/10, and to get listed on that page you have to pay Google $10,000 per year to be part of their program.

Before you claim I’m overreacting, let me state my case with some evidence:

1. The only way to get a link on this page is to pay Google $10,000 per year.

2. Google is against the inclusion of paid links in their Pagerank algorithm that helps determine search results. Here is a quote from their Corporate Technology page:

PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. Important pages receive a higher PageRank and appear at the top of the search results. Google’s technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance. There is no human involvement or manipulation of results, which is why users have come to trust Google as a source of objective information untainted by paid placement.

3. Google’s most prominent blogger Matt Cutts has spoken out against paid links and recommended use of the rel=”NOFOLLOW” attribute.

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I have analysed the W3C .org domain to evaluate whether their activities would fall under the category “LINK SALE”.

W3C has a membership program, following description

As a W3C Member, the most important measure of value in joining the Consortium can be found in the adoption of W3C specifications worldwide, and the growing dependence of global commerce and information exchange upon these specifications. W3C Members help pioneer this growth process. Levels of involvement can range from simply associating your organization with W3C endeavors, receiving early access of Member-confidential information, assisting with driving work efforts, generating new ideas, and/or developing future Web technologies.

It has not been mentioned that the membership includes a direct link to a members website that can actually boost a page to position 1# at Google for highly competitive keywords. I am under the impression this is in fact hidden link sale as companies that have sufficient funds can buy a membership and the high quality back link that is included.

The membership fee for Germany for example will be as follows, I presume the 6500 Euro price is applicable to majority of my blog readers :

Organization Type in Germany (country category HIC) Annual Fee

For-profit organization that has annual gross revenue,
as measured by the most recent audited statement,
of greater than or equal to 51,000,000.

Free is EUR. 65,000 EUR

All other organizations, including not-profit
organizations and government agencies.

The fee is 6,500 EUR

In this case it seems as if I can buy a link at a price of 6500 Euro / 12 = 542 Euro monthly.

Sounds like a reasonable price for a PR7 Link with a link power of way over 2000 This will surely get your page to the top and in result you sill have sufficient sales to fund such a link on a permanent basis.

This is where Google should be looking !!!