Google Finally Responds To Paid Links Allegations On Apache.org

For years we have known Apache.org, the Apache Foundation, has been giving thanks to its big sponsors and donors with a thank you page with links that do not have the nofollow link attribute on it. Google's John Mueller, three years after I wrote about it, responded to these allegations.

First, you can find the links on this thank you page that lists Google, Amazon, Verizon, Microsoft, Facebook, Comcast, IBM, Baidu, Red Hat and so many others with thank you links. The most expensive links now cost $125,000 per year!

In any event, Google's John Mueller said:

• Don't assume these links do any benefit to these sites in terms of how they rank in Google
• Those links have been there for well over a decade
• The correct way to deal with them is to use the rel-nofollow
• Google does take action to prevent links like these from affecting our search results, even without the re-nofollow.
• Links that are nofollowed do have a benefit outside of search, they are essentially called ads, he said.

Here are those tweets:

I wouldn't assume those links do the linked sites any good when it comes to search :).

— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) September 9, 2019

AFAIK those links have been there for well over a decade.. The correct way to deal with them is to use the rel-nofollow, but even without that we take action to prevent links like these from affecting our search results.

— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) September 9, 2019

The setup of those links is still the same though.
Sponsor the ASF if you want, they create things that drive a large part of the web, but don't assume that the links from there are magical.

— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) September 9, 2019

Sure :). There are lots of reasons to have links that don't pass pagerank or other signals -- it's essentially how most ads work :).

— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) September 9, 2019

So what do you all think? Should Google send a manual action to Apache? Maybe they did already? We just don't know much about what is really happening with these links...

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Update: From former Google search quality rep:

It doesn't make any sense to issue a manual action here. The intent is not manipulative. Most likely, Google has already cut any PageRank flow from that page.

Manual actions aren't the only way to deal with things that aren't set as they should. https://t.co/9mp1zYf8mV

— Pedro Dias: ~/pedro$ (@pedrodias) September 9, 2019