Paid Text Link Ads Are Doomed
In a recent post, I refered to the problem of relying on a business model that is based on paid text link advertising. I think it’s worth discussing this topic more and there have been some worthwhile recent debates about this very subject on blogosphere.
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 just a few days ago 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.
I have to confess to being a complete hypocrite in this matter. I sell text links via TLA and have even bought some on behalf of clients. Why wouldn’t I? It’s easy money and satisfies my clients who are obsessed with the pagerank game. If it gives them peace of mind and a way to make sense of things, so be it. I’m always just amazed at how many of my clients, extremely intelligent in so many respects, buy into this pagerank hoodwink. Of course it matters…I guess...but it’s just too random, without clear guidelines, to base anything concrete, business-wise, on. I have a lot of PR5 and PR6 websites which are just rubbish, make zilch moneywise and don’t appear in SE results for anything. Meanwhile, I have a lot of PR3 websites which have had a mountain of love and work put in, make lots of money and appear high in the SEs for a bunch of enquiries. 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....
I’ve been down this road before. Last year, on behalf of a large SEO firm in Dublin, with quite some trouble- I set up a team of manual reciprocal linkbuilders in Asia. I had 50 employees in place and had orders for over 100 websites, requiring an average of 300 confirmed, quality, relevant reciprocal links per month, each. Going on a 10% success rate, that’s approx. 3,000 websites researched per month, for each order- thus the significant manpower required. And then…the Jagger update happened in October, 2005. In a single day, our “business model” was gone and we were burnt. Out of the game. Finished. You could say that we had been unlucky- as what we were doing would have been almost a guaranteed success for the previous five years, so ours was just bad timing. In hindsight, however, I have come to realise that it was a “house built on sand“. On behalf of our clients, we were trying to artificially inflate their website’s ranking and employing shortcut SEO techniques, trying to fool Google and the other SEs in terms of link popularity.
This is the same scenario waiting to happen with paid text link ads. It’s not if, it’s when. Doomed. I’ll leave the final word to Matt Cutts-:
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.
[...] Mosey at Jack of All Blogs feels that it is unethical to buy links (although he admits using TLA) and says, that days of paid text link ads might be numbered. [...]
DesiPundit » Archives » Paid Text Link Ads are Doomed? said this on September 27, 2006 5:15 am
[...] Quimby’s tiger was released from his soul over Paid Text Links Ads and Google’s policy on them. Or my post about it..whatever. Ah well…paid or unpaid links, Matt Cutts slobbering and Google worshipping aside, surely we can find something more approriate to release our soul’s energy over? [...]
Jack of All Blogs » Blog Archive » Tiger In the Tale said this on October 9, 2006 10:09 am