Sphinn - The Paid Links Industry Needs To Go Underground

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The Paid Links Industry Needs To Go Underground

Went Hot: October 8, 2007 - 12:53 pm
Posted By: DavidWallace 636 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.searchrank.com)
Category: Link Building

If Danny Sullivan's report over the weekend that Google is in fact reducing the PageRank for sites that are suspected of selling paid links isn't enough to send the entire paid links industry underground, then I don't know what is. Add to this the storm of controversy that recently occurred over Rand Fishkin outing sites that sell paid links. I have been a proponent for some time now of the entire industry working to make it more difficult for Google and other search engines to identify paid link strategies. Currently we are making their job way to easy.

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from storyspinner 636 days ago #

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Bingo David... Bingo. (and not the dog either) :)

from AdsenseAnnie 636 days ago #

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Yup, I have been thinking about making the switch from Text Link Ads to either none at all (paid links are a small fraction of my earnings) or "underground" links that only the advertiser and I know were paid for (i.e. a link in the content of a blog post that happens to be related to the merchant's site). The downside is this always feels a little dishonest (readers don't have any way to decipher what's a paid link or not). Oh well, this article gives food for thought on the subject.

from mike.tekula 636 days ago #

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Yep, this is the truth. Nothing wrong with going underground - it's even kinda fun in a secret agent sort of way.

When I see sites that display links under a header like, "sponsors," I just have to ask: why would you not change that in light of what has happened. Google has made its position clear - they're coming after link brokers and buyers. If I were involved in something like this, which I happen not to be (although I've been eyeing it), I'd be scrambling to mask these links as well as possible as soon as possible.

from fantomaster 636 days ago #

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Good article, thanks for that.
At the end of the day, all these Google antics will merely achieve one thing: raising the price tag for paid links. Link sellers and brokers will adapt, clients will undergo severe screening, NDAs will be tightened up - and pricing will reflect the additional effort required to keep everything functional. (Quite similar to the drug market, really.)
But will paid links go away? No such luck: The only way to kill this industry is by not making ANY links count for whatever anymore. After which, links will still be sold - for their traffic value.

from AndyBeard 636 days ago #

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I am sorry but I disagree with the article in amny ways.

Google is attacking mainly paid reviews, not paid links - there are a few cases of people with just paid links that have been hit, but this could also be due to other factors such as having specific sales pages mentioning PageRank as a reason to purchase a link.

With paid reviews there are ethical and legal considerations. You can't hide it - well you could but that would be deplorable.

As I wrote earlier today, I don't sell PageRank

from DavidWallace 636 days ago #

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@ AndyBeard

We have yet to buy any paid reviews for clients yet. The sites I have personally see hit by the Google war guns are content related sites that simply sell text links among other advertising. They do not promote them as links to help sites rank well or to benefit from PageRank. However some of them do shoot themselves in the foot by making the links easily identifiable as "paid links" to Google's algorithm and/or having affiiate banners/links for certain link brokers.

from toprank 636 days ago #

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I'm not a fan of paid links in the way most are but not for the reasons you'd think. Paid links are advertising - a media buy, not unlike advertorial. Ours is a PR thing, not advertising. Regardless, search engines should be smart enough to pick out such links and do what they need to do without "throwing the baby out with the bathwater".

from demib 636 days ago #

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As usual I agree very much with you, Fantom. However, it is going to be much harder for text link brokers and pay per post companies to work

from DimWit 636 days ago # - show/hide this comment

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Yeah, paid links should go underground - they should be buried altogether! Just like Walmart trying to pass off conventional produce as organic, the attempt to legitimize paid links as 'organic' is self-serving and disingenuous.

Ultimately, the user community should determine relevance, not the search engines, and certainly not marketers. When linking happens in a truly 'organic' fashion, without the 'market' making a commodity of the connection, everybody wins. Short cuts like paid links only undermine the integrity of search results overall - if you want rankings, try earning them. Encourage your clients to create content that is worth linking to! Or advise them to put their money where it belongs, in Adsense.

from AndyBeard 636 days ago #

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@David you might be monitoring many different sites and monitoring different conversations. I could easily list 30, possibly 40 sites that write reviews that have been hit, and they are generally the more prominent earners in the paid reviews writing "profession" - and I wouldn't class any of those as "big hitters".
I also know blogs that have written paid reviews that don't use nofollow on the links, that Matt Cutts is known to read, that don't seem to have received a penalty.

The problem is many of these sites also carry text links, so it is hard to pin down.

Then there are the companies that play the "holier than thou" route, who stick nofollow on their advertising in the sidebar, but drop links to their sponsors every chance they can get, with links directly rather than through some redirect or database of similar companies.

from TheMadHat 636 days ago #

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@Andy the "holier than thou" people are who I look for these days. In very competitive markets you're going to have to buy links and you're going to have to be sneaky about it. We can talk about linkbait, viral content, etc forever but links is still where it's at and until they figure out another way and eliminate the value of the link, I and many others will be buying links under the radar.

I'd rather not have to subvert the search engines but it's the easiest and fastest way.

from MattKeegan 635 days ago #

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Broken link...article will not show.

from lukesample 635 days ago #

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This is EXACTLY why we started our underground text link marketplace. It is the only way to go these days.

The thing people also forget here is that the links should be high quality. Luckily, a high quality links goes hand-in-hand with paid links that aren't detected or discounted by google currently.

If you want to go underground, use us. *shameless but relevant plug* http://www.textlinkcenter.com