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Buying Grid gives The Messenger a boost in social, not just in staffing its newsroom
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Aug. 28, 2012, 10:41 a.m.
LINK: www.mattcutts.com  ➚   |   Posted by: Joshua Benton   |   August 28, 2012

Matt Cutts, Google’s SEO czar, passed along his answer to that question. The newspaper was selling links:

In Google’s world, we take paid links that pass PageRank as seriously as Amazon would take paid reviews without disclosure or as your newspaper would treat a reporter who was paid to link to a website in an article without disclosing the payment.

A good reminder of the danger of those “Partner Links” sections you sometimes still see on news sites: Once Google finds out about them, you can enter a world of pain.

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