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There are a lot of unknown questions around the Google Search Engine Algorithm’s. Everybody wants to know how certain things work. People often speculate and create their own theories

when they cant get straight answers from Google (which is most of the time). Matt Cutts is an employee of Google. He has a Blog where he comments on Google Search Engine information and cats, amongst other things. Yes, I said cats. He spoke out on the impact of paid links on a website PageRank.Read more about paid links impact on PageRank.

This post is an update of a previous smaller post on the same topic. This post gives more details and answers too several common questions about paid links and whether there good or bad for a websites PageRank.

Here are a few question and answer quotes from Matts blog that I found interesting and my comments:

Q: Now when you say “paid links,” what exactly do you mean by that? Do you view all paid links as potential violations of Google’s quality guidelines?
A: Good question. As someone working on quality and relevance at Google, my bottom-line concern is clean and relevant search results on Google. As such, I care about paid links that flow PageRank and attempt to game Google’s rankings. I’m not worried about links that are paid but don’t affect search engines. So when I say “paid links” it’s pretty safe to add in your head “paid links that flow PageRank and attempt to game Google’s rankings.”

So it appears relevancy is the primary concern, meaning a paid link is not a problem as long as it is linking to a relevant page or site.

Q: Hey, as long as we’re talking about directories, can you talk about the role of directories, some of whom charge for a reviewer to evaluate them?
A: I’ll try to give a few rules of thumb to think about when looking at a directory. When considering submitting to a directory, I’d ask questions like:
- Does the directory reject urls? If every url passes a review, the directory gets closer to just a list of links or a free-for-all link site.
- What is the quality of urls in the directory? Suppose a site rejects 25% of submissions, but the urls that are accepted/listed are still quite low-quality or spammy. That doesn’t speak well to the quality of the directory.
- If there is a fee, what’s the purpose of the fee? For a high-quality directory, the fee is primarily for the time/effort for someone to do a genuine evaluation of a url or site.

Those are a few factors I’d consider. If you put on your user hat and ask “Does this seem like a high-quality directory to me?” you can usually get a pretty good sense as well, or ask a few friends for their take on a particular directory.

This answer is somewhat grey and I beleive it will always be grey as long as “Yahoo” and other major directories sell links. I don’t think Google can afford to ignore large players directories.

Q: I don’t think paid links are the biggest threat to Google’s quality. I think technique X is having a bigger impact; why aren’t you tackling that?
A: It’s a safe assumption that Google’s webspam team is working on several different things at once. The posts I did in mid-April were mainly to reiterate Google’s stance on paid links and provide a way that people can give us feedback if they want. I hope that the examples above give an idea of the sort of things that people want to tell us about, and that we want to hear about.

Paid links is not the only thing that Google is working on.