Paid Text Linking: The Inquisition

There has been a recent crackdown on paid link values – even those paid links coming from what are considered authority sites – such as Forbes.com and WashingtonPost.com. Those sites experienced a penalty slap of their own pageranks by Google.

This is having a new impact in because Google is actively enforcing these penalties on both the buyers and sellers of paid links.

The "paid link penalty" is actually an old topic in Googles algorithms with a clear mention by Google  in Patent 6,285,999, applied for in 1998. The patent states that advertisements or paid links are considered forms of spamming and are desired not to be included in search engine results.

Google has publicly talked about removing value or weight from sites that sell links for a while. It is a very interesting and complex conversation.

What Google is trying to prevent is "paid relevence". Paying does not equate relevance. And providing the most relevant content – paid or unpaid . . . is Google's mission. With paid links determining results, Google cannot guarantee the relevancy.

So, Google has put some conditions on the use of paid links. As per Google, “Not all paid links violate our guidelines.” Paid links can be used within their guidelines by adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to the <a> tag or redirecting the links with a nofollow robots.txt file

Another possible consideration in allowing the buying and selling of links is to demand theme-relevancy along with the payement.

With certain web locations already deemed as trusted authorities sites, payment alone should probably not dampen the link value. An example of a "paid link" trusted source is the Yahoo directory.

In fact Google recommends, “Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo! as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.” This advice is given rightt in their Webmaster Guidelines.

And they are stating their use of favored directories as seed sites as mentioned in the patent 7,096,214.

Many of these "relevant directories" alluded to by Google (including Yahoo directory), are paid directories.

While Yahoo Directory may experience fluctuations in their pageranks as Google sorts out it’s own definitions of paid link values- ultimately they are already identified as a major source of what sites are on topic and so a link in their directory will benefit you.

Google technology has impreoved enough so that it can actually better determine and measure the weight of what it considers a good link versus a bad link. And it can be speculated that over time the ability to discern good and bad paid links will become even further defined and refined in their algorithms.

Here are some apparent conflicting and contradictor statements from Google that we are waiting to become resolved:

Statement:

"Google does not weight paid links"

Contradiction:

Yet, contradictions show that Google does value some paid links if inclusion is topic relevant and editorial decision supports it.

Another point of confusion is whether or not Google doesn’t like paid links next to news items, or if they just direspect paid links in general.

There does appear to be a contradiction in Googles own business practices since people pay for relevant content links with Adwords and Adsense.

Additionally, they appear to allow Forbes and the Washington post to display Google ads next to their news items with zero penalty.

Futhermore Google's original statement about the relevancy of links in business states in this U.S. Pat. No. 6,285,999:

“Estimating the importance of each backlink to a page can be useful for many purposes including site design, business arrangements with the backlinkers, and marketing. The effect of potential changes to the hypertext structure can be evaluated by adding them to the link structure and recomputing the ranking.”

In all of this hullabaloo, it is important to note that the root issue is less about if a link is paid for or not paid for- and more about the relevancy of the paid link in it’s presence on the page, the selective listing of the link to the benefit of the end user . . . and the appearance of a link as being useful and related to the overall nature of the sites business or niche.  The most important thing is that a paid inbound link campaign does not artificially skew the algorithms that were written to return reliable search engine results to the end user.

Basically, if the paid link is coming from a site that is not considered a trusted or favored source within a given niche/topic/theme it is better to stay away from that neighborhood and avoid paying for a link merely for links sake.

It is unwise to buy links merely for pagerank alone, and this is the point.

Google does not want you to buy links for pagerank – instead they want you to buy the link for the quality traffic it should bring your business.  And they are preparing in search engines  to slap any site that participates in skewing the search results via paid link buying or selling.

Major Directories and Guides:

Of course, with some Google-sanctioned directories and guides, you are (gasp) paying for the links- and unless these directories use nofollow tags, they are passing page rank and Google seems to be contradicting their own guidelines.

However, as mentioned before, because directories and guides are necessary in evaluating and building a semantic web by the very nature of their hierarchical and themed structure - the favored ones (that is the ones that serve a useful function for end users) will not be included in this slap. In  fact, authority websites and themed directories with unique content will receive benefit.

The reason that Google justifies the selling of links by authority sites is because the site is primarily collecting payment for manually combing through and evaluating potentially unique themed content in order to create a more organized and thematically concise web.


The Future of Themed Linking:

Over time we may see a refined Google that can somehow determine if a paid link beyond directories and guides is valuable- but until then… stay away from low quality paid links, especially ones that pass pagerank.

Only pay for a link if the traffic is right on target to you niche, market, topic, or theme.

Instead focus on getting free content and contributions with straight links coming from "high-quality" neighborhoods.

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