Paid Links and Google

Introduction

In the early days of the web, people made websites as a hobby. Among the hundreds of personal home pages, some people developed useful information resources pages, news and businesses moved into selling their products online. As the number of internet users and websites ballooned, attracting large numbers of targeted traffic became increasingly more valuable and created a new markets in links and search engine optimisation.

How Did we Get Here?

The success of Google to become the dominant search engine, through its PageRank algorithm became the model for the new market. As a enticing statistic for webmasters, the Google Toolbar was created. Like religion, this little green bar is responsible for many arguments and conflict among SEOs but also like religion, the debate is pointless as it is fairly meaningless.

Ever since it appeared, people have worried about their toolbar PageRank whether it has gone up or down and as an easily obtainable figure it has been used as a barometer of the value of a page when selling links.

(True PageRank is not meaningless but a calculated metric which is one of the 200+ factors that make up the Google algorithm. It depends on the PageRank of the number of links pointing to your site. Over the whole of the web this can be calculated and list of values of PageRank can be applied.)

Paid Links

Almost every webmaster would like to make some money for their efforts.  If they can sell links it is their right to do so.  However, this is against Google policy since links affect the results of the rankings. Making it possible for sites to effectively buy their way to the top of the index. Their advice is that it is okay for webmasters to sell links for money but that these must not pass on the link weight of the page, using the rel=”nofollow” attribute. This would mean that the link benefit results from the traffic the passes through the link. A followed link has this and also the potential to raise the linked web page higher in the rankings for query in the anchor text. Arguably, this is worth more to the buyer than the traffic through a site.

Many people have gone ahead and simply sold links on their pages without  being aware of the guidelines or have chosen  to simply ignored them.

Google will of course allow a site to buy their way to the top of the search engine through their own Adwords programme. If your advert has ‘quality’, and you bid enough you can reach the number one position on the sponsored search results page on the right-hand side of the page. These links are okay.

Conclusion

In my opinion, I think that Google is applying double standards. While they can control who goes into their index they are using their dominance of the search engine market to force people to comply with their guidelines instead of changing the algorithm. I also think they are being anti-competitive because other search engines should act on the no follow directives.

Webmasters should follow their own convictions in this matter and if they are going to sell paid links, be prepared to suffer a penalty in toolbar PageRank.  If you sell links, don’t give any indication that they are paid links by inclusion of the text such as sponsored links, advertising links, etc. If you have a choice in advertisers make your links relevant to your site.