Earlier I wrote a post comparing the problem of buying links to buying Diggs. This is part 2 of that post.
Google (and the other SEs) do one thing right. They keep the playing field fairly fair. The little guys have as much of an opportunity as the big guys.
Paid links basically take search engine arena and greatly tilt it toward people with lots of cash. All Google is doing is saying “hey, your links won’t count toward your SERPS”. Purchased links can, however, still be a way of advertising and they should be used as such.
When someone buys a link it is counted as an extra link no matter what. Even if the site has crap content they have an extra link. But when someone buys an ad space they have to offer a good website to make people want to link to them.
That is the difference.
Paid link that gets counted = extra link even if the site is lame. Paid link that doesn’t get counted = the site better have kickass info or else they are wasting money. It is much more fair.
If you are someone who still can’t see the difference let me explain it one more time - Buying an advertisement doesn’t guarantee anything. Buying a text link that counts in the SEs guarantees extra juice.
So, why not take the link juice away and force those who buy text links to make good content and offer good services in order to get better rankings? A huge problem I’ve seen with paid-for links is most of them link to borderline spam sites, and I have a feeling that same issue is what made Google decide to offer a “report paid links” service.
I truly hope the other SEs soon follow.
If you are wondering these two posts were in response to comments on one of Shoemoney’s posts.
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August 22nd, 2007 at 11:39 pm
I don’t think paid links should count toward a sites page rank. Unfortunately though the more money you put into advertising means more people have heard of you and more people will link to your page. That is as long as you have good content.
August 23rd, 2007 at 12:09 am
Exactly, google is trying to keep the internet from becoming like real life - where if you throw cash at a problem it goes away. They want people to actually have to work (to create good timeless content) to achieve something online.
August 25th, 2007 at 6:49 am
Thats a really good argument, I think your right but Google can’t police everywhere there are still many places links could be bought under their radar.
August 25th, 2007 at 9:46 am
yes, it isn’t a perfect system, but I think Google’s main goal with this is to keep low quality sites from ranking above more trusted ones. They’ve finally realized they can’t do it with pure algos, so I suspect they have been switching a lot of engineers over into more “surf the web for spam sites” type of positions.
August 26th, 2007 at 4:45 am
Actually google took another step to minimize the affect paid links have on a sites ranking. They don’t count any link that includes the tag rel=”nofollow when it calculates page rank. They started doing this to prevent people from spamming blogs. There are very few blogs now that don’t automatically add this tag on any user created link. This affects a lot of SEO companies that sell back links.
August 26th, 2007 at 9:44 am
“They started doing this to prevent people from spamming blogs.”
Yeah, but sadly that hasn’t worked at all, which is why many (I’d guess 10-15%) of bloggers are starting to strip nofollow’s added by their CMS like WordPress.