Google’s Take On Text Link Ads
In Google’s “Quality Guidelines“, it states pretty clearly-:
“Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
Matt Cutts (hopefully, needs no introduction) said in a post last month-:
“The best links are not paid, or exchanged….the best links are earned and given by choice.”
Such was the reaction to this post, that Matt posted again later to clarify his position-:
“I wouldn’t be surprised if search engines begin to take stronger action against link buying in the near future.”
Matt’s take on this is logical. Why, when Google won’t recognize its own paid ad links as “authentic votes” would it reward other sites’ paid ad links? Right now, the process still does reward, in error, those webmasters who want to gain pagerank. But the days of such PR transfers are clearly numbered.
An excellent soul-searching post appeared re: this topic on the O’Reilly Radar blog. To quote from the post-:
“Long term, I’m pretty sure that supporting people who game search engines is not a good thing. The result will be that search engines are less able to reach their promise as an expression of the collective intelligence of the net.”
…in reaction to a post of outrage on Phil Ringnalda’s blog.
This harks back to the Link Condom arguments a la 2005, open warfare in some cases: Danny Sullivan says YES, Jeremy Zawodny says NO and a host of other SE gurus weighing in. All of that seems to have quietened down over the last six months, but maybe, just maybe, it’s rearing its head again before the next Google PR update.
As one of the comments said, by TallTroll, in reply to Matt’s aforementioned post-:
Matt, the professionals don’t care a lot about PageRank, and you know it.
And where it gets totally absurd is when people are buying text links in order to gain pagerank, so that they can in turn sell text links off the very same site they have been buying links for. Oh dear!! If only life were so simple….
In previous years, SEO experts tried to fool Google with reciprocal link strategies, to artificially create “link popularity“. This was put to bed in Google’s “Jagger Update” in October, 2005.
Is the same scenario waiting to happen with paid text link ads. It’s not if, it’s when. Doomed. As Matt Cutts concludes-:
Many people who work on ranking at search engines think that selling links can lower the quality of links on the web. If you want to buy or sell a link purely for visitors or traffic and not for search engines, a simple method exists to do so (the nofollow attribute). Google’s stance on selling links is pretty clear and we’re pretty accurate at spotting them, both algorithmically and manually. Sites that sell links can lose their trust in search engines.
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Correction: Jagger Update was October 2005, not 2007.
Part of the problem I have with this is the relevance factor. If I want to sell links on my site, it’s a given (for me, not for everyone) that the links I choose to display must be relevant and geared toward who I already know are my visitors. Likewise, if I’m going to buy links, it’s going to be on a site where I think their visitors would appreciate the information I have to give.
That said, I know that most people who are heavily into link buying/selling are doing it for less than honorable (so to speak) reasons, however not everyone does it for that reason. I look at it as simple advertising though - what’s the difference really, short of the “nofollow”? Both link brokers I’ve worked with to sell space on some of my own sites do so with some sort of javascript, which the SE’s can’t read anyway. So why the drop in “trust”?
Frankly, I don’t see it stopping as a trend - regardless of it’s “Google weight” - it’s still a valid form of advertising by all other standards. I just don’t think it’s fair to be penalized for it - don’t count it as “link juice” if you want, Google, but don’t punish people for advertising their sites.
> Correction: Jagger Update was October 2005, not 2007
Looks fine to me Lara
Sneaky sneak.
[…] in Google’s Page Rank system. (I say “for now” because I see a lot of “writing on the wall” that those days may be coming to an […]
Google is doing the right thing, and I hope MSN and Yahoo will follow suit too.
We do not need such unethical behavior. Link buying is fine as long as the rel=nofollow attribute is used.
The problem is not the BUYING links… the problem is the fact that bought links are used to gain ranks.
If you have bought links on a good website then the links itself are worth the money because of the traffic they generate. They can use no-follow to make shure that search engines are not fooled by these bought links.
I have to agree with Lara. If Google doesn’t want the competition for advertising, they should just base all of their weight on page content and how long a user stays on a page and call it good. Discontinue using PR as a link weighting criteria and let people sell links and ad space as they wish. Google is just a huge tool of the internet. They don’t own it.