Google and Paid Links
by Sapphire (September 15, 2006)
I came across an interesting article at SEORoundtable about Google devaluing paid links. It sounds like Adam Laznik is saying Google only devalues paid links if they’re bought for the purpose of gaining pagerank. Which would be fair and reasonable, if Google had a way of knowing whether it was the pagerank or the traffic you were after.
For the life of me, I can’t see how they’d tell the difference. Generally, the more trafficked sites are likely to have higher pagerank, so how can you tell which is inspiring the link purchases?
Posted in Ad Networks, SEO, Traffic
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September 16th, 2006 at 4:36 am
Many paid links are grouped closely together, are sitewide, and are not exactly topically relevant. If you got a seed set of known link buyers (some are really obvious) and cross referenced their backlinks to look for other odd links you could keep doing iterative functions to find known buyers and known sellers…where the paid links stick out like a sore thumb.
I have bought and sold some links that I know Google would most likely never be able to find because I made them look so legitimate doing things like co-citation or in content links + co-citation.
September 16th, 2006 at 9:04 am
Okay, so there are a lot of cases where it’s very obvious, and that’s what Google is talking about. What concerns me is that I’ve been thinking of buying sitewide sidebar text links from sites that aren’t precisely “relevant” to my product, but that have an audience I think might like my site: for (fictional) example, if I sell knitting products, I buy a link at a cooking site that has a mostly female audience. From a purely marketing standpoint, this is a trick I’d like to try - I think it might catch knitters off-guard and make them more curious about what I’m offering. But now I’m concerned I’ll trip a filter because in Google’s eyes, the SITES aren’t relevant to each other, and that’s a red flag.
September 16th, 2006 at 10:19 am
[...] Get the word out to sites that share relevant traffic. I’m concerned that some legitimate marketing strategies could sometimes fall afoul of filters (say that three times fast), but I’m not sure I can be bothered to worry. Should I avoid a potentially traffic-building, perfectly ethical strategy for no reason other than that Google might have a filter against it thanks to the shenanigans of search engine optimizers? [...]
September 17th, 2006 at 8:13 am
So how relevant is relevant is sorta up to you to test it out…but in theory they really can’t give you to much crap if you would find the traffic stream relevant in nature.
Also keep in mind that Google is probably the single most hypocritical link broker of all time. They allowed Ford to buy all sorts of off tartet ads via AdSense. They place trademark terms in their AdLinks and direct people who click on those to ad listings that may not include ads for the trademark company. And they sold pre-teen sex AdWords ads at one point.
September 17th, 2006 at 12:51 pm
That puts some perspective on the whole issue. Thank you for your input.
Sounds to me like I might as well just stick to good, sound marketing principles, and hope for the best.