My Network
Feeds
Paid links work. In any competitive industry, smart link-buying is necessary if a site wants to rank in the SERPs. From Google’s perspective, it’s the single biggest threat to the relevance of their algorithm. So what should they do about it?
8 Comments
8 Comments
Comments
Pretty interesting idea. Don’t penalize link sellers, just the buyers. Get rid of nofollow, instead self-report to Google. Maybe Google would in turn give juice to 100% honest and successful sellers or try to sway them into adsense / doubleclick programs.
Google doesn’t want to defeat paid links... they sell links. That’s the problem. You sell links on your own damn page, and it’s horning in on their AdSense revenue.
@ danielsan1701 - A lot of people feel that way about Google’s stance toward paid links, but Google always distinguishes between paid links that influence search results and ones that do not. AdSense doesn’t influence search results, while that is the exact intention of most paid links.
From the article "Keeping link-buyers in the dark about the value of their paid links can only be good for Google and for link-selling webmasters."What kind of logic is this? It would be good for Google, but bad for the link sellers. When does a seller benefit if the buyer doesn’t have any idea of how much the product or service is worth? "Upsides to This Plan The independent webmaster makes money Link-buyers spend money with little or no ROI, which is even more difficult for them to measure" What? Buyers get no ROI, but they continue to spend? This whole plan makes no sense. Besides, if Google wants to “defeat” paid links, a much easier way would be to stop giving out PR information, which sellers use to price their links.
@ crimsongirl - "When does a seller benefit if the buyer doesn’t have any idea of how much the product or service is worth?"All the time, like when I bought a crappy fiddle in Nepal for US$15 that I later realized I could get for US$2. The seller in that case certainly benefited. Why do people buy billboard advertising if its ROI can’t be easily measured?Also, withholding PR information wouldn’t stop link-buying. Link-buyers would just put more emphasis on backlinks, age of domain and on-page factors.
Interesting idea, and amazingly immoral.Screwing your business partner (the guy who buys links from you) will benefit you in the long run?Telling Google "I’ve just taken money from someone with the full knowledge that I’m gonna report him to the police the minute the deal is done" will benefit you?In war, traitors are not trusted even by those they go over to. Would you earn Google’s trust by demonstrating your dishonesty in business dealings?
Immoral? Yes.But are those business partners going to keep paying for links once a site’s PageRank is stripped?I think anything that creates distrust between link-buyers and link-sellers can only be good for Google. The solution is based on the assumption that Google has already started busting down sites that sell links and will do so more aggressively in the future. That "Report Paid Links" form in Google’s Webmaster Tools has already seen a lot of use.Here’s a question: If Google sends you, a link-selling webmaster, a notice that it has detected paid links on your site, which will be forgiven if you come clean about them, what would you do?
It’s a post that tries to address the issue in an enthusiastic way - it is does seem awfully naive about actual actions in the wild that Google are involved with.Read more about what Google’s doing - watch what Google’s doing - and see that they are treading as carefully as possible on a very narrow wire.Funnily enough, in another window, just binned yet another link buying request for one of my websites. :)