What is really a "paid" link anyway?
January 30, 2008
This post is going to be a bit controversial, but I think it needs to be written. I want to talk about Google's policy of going after sites that offer "paid" links, and why it's a slippery slope to have that policy (even if their actions were hardly a surprise).
First, The Issue At Hand
You are probably already aware that Google has gone on the warpath against paid links. Their Webmaster Help Center has an entry entitled "Why should I report paid links to Google?". It discusses the reasons why Google feels you should report people who are buying or selling links to or from their websites.
Google's algorithm is unable to tell the difference between a paid link and one given "freely" (what they consider freely, anyway — more on that in a bit). Why is it incapable? Because there's no technical difference between a link that's been purchased with cash and a link that has been made for some other reason. The HTML code is the same. The only way you can tell the difference is if the site selling the link puts "Sponsored" or "Advertisement" or something to that effect on the page, marking the link as paid.
Since Google is incapable of telling the difference between a paid link and a "natural" one, and because so many webmasters are aware of the impact of their site ranking in Google because of links, up until now it's been a natural business decision to purchase links that will help a site rank better. A wise business owner might reason, "It costs me $1,000 a month in links to rank in Google for keywords that earn me $5,000 a month in profits. That's a sound investment." And so they've buy, and rank, and earn.
Google isn't happy with this. From their perspective, this de facto process of purchasing rankings undermines the integrity of their algorithm. They want the best results possible to display in the top search results, and from their perspective buying your way to the top isn't "fair" (unless you buy your way in via AdWords, of course).
Google "Slaps" the Link Sellers
In an effort to stop this practice, Google manually reduced the PageRank of a number of high-profile link sellers last year, resulting in quite the panic among link brokers. PageRank is the currency of link sellers (even though it's a myth that high PageRank means good rankings), and so they naturally freaked. A PR4 link doesn't command near the price as a PR7 or PR8 link does.
I find it rather naive of Google to be so shocked that this process has been going on. Honestly, for as long as Google has been number one people have bought and sold links. Textlinkbrokers.com, Backlinks.com and Text-link-ads.com have been around since 2003, and they're hardly the first of their kind (just some of the first to allow buying and selling links in such an organized fashion).
Google is big business, and as long as top rankings mean more dollars for business owners, they will continue to see the dollars it takes to rank in Google in the light of what return they will see for their investment. Google's current attempts to manually "slap" sites that sell links by reducing their PageRank will not stop this practice. All it will do is cause the practice to go a bit further underground.
Make no mistake: what Google did last year was manual. Human reviewers made the decision to demote specific link selling web sites. I know this because there are huge volumes of sites that are still selling links without any negative impact from Google. The sites that continue to sell links without grave consequences are the sites that were rather smarter about the manner in which they go about selling those links (no "Sponsor" or "Advertisement" banner giving them away as link sellers, and no blatant solicitations for buying links on their sites).
Link Buyers Aren't Slapped
Google is not able to penalize sites which buy links from these sources, not without opening a huge can of worms. The minute Google starts counting any sort of external link against the linked-to site, there will be a flood of site owners running out and putting up links to their competitors with large red "SPONSORED" flags all over the pages, in an effort to get their competition "slapped".
They will go out on a link buying frenzy with their huge budgets to make sure they stick it to the competition before the competition sticks it to them. So Google is targeting the sites selling the links, not the sites buying them.
What Really is a "Paid" Link?
Okay, enough history. Let's get into the heart of the matter. What constitutes a "paid" link? From Google's actions last year, it seems that they consider a transaction of dollars between the link buyer and seller to be a "paid" link. They claim in the Webmaster Help Center article about reporting links (cited above) that Google "works hard to ensure that it fully discounts links intended to manipulate search engine results."
Baloney.
If Google was really interested in discounting all links "intended to manipulate search engine results", they would completely devalue all links from articles that get syndicated from places like EzineArticles.com. Those links drive traffic, which is "okay" from Google's perspective, but they are there at least as much for SEO manipulation purposes (both from the article sites themselves and from the sites which choose to publish the articles). I've yet to see an article publisher who uses the NOFOLLOW tag in the links within their articles, and I have yet to see Google deindex or penalize an article because they're not using NOFOLLOW.
Here's where the concept of a "paid" link starts to get fuzzy. If you wrote the article that you're syndicating yourself, perhaps it can be argued that the link was not "paid" for (though it certainly had a cost in terms of time). But if you paid a writer to produce the article for you, and you turn around and syndicate that article to get more links to your site, have you not, in fact, paid for those links?
Google says to "syndicate carefully" because of duplicate content issues, but they do not say not to syndicate. By the way they discuss syndication throughout their help text and their blog, it's clear that they see content syndication as an acceptable form of self-promotion — which they should.
And really, when a site syndicates your content, are they doing so out of the goodness of their hearts? No, they're not. They're doing so because it earns them money, usually from advertising revenue. So even if you are not paying the site owner for that link on the page, the advertisers are. So somebody has paid for that link to be there, even if it wasn't you.
Let's take this even further. Let's say that you have an article written and posted to your web site. The article was very expensive, because it was very good, real "link bait" material as it's called in the SEO world. Because it's so good it generates hundreds of links back to it, which results in great rankings in Google. Did you not, in fact, pay for those links when you paid the author?
It's true that you didn't know precisely how many links you were getting, and that you didn't pay the sites any cash to put up the links, but you bought those links just the same. You bought them with great content, which cost you money. Google recommends creating great content in their Webmaster Guidelines — again, rightly so.
Those same Webmaster Guidlines cause even more trouble for Google's rage against the purchased link. One of the things Google suggests you do to get your site noticed and ranked is to "submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites."
Now, it doesn't cost you anything to get listed in ODP, so that's safe, but Yahoo! offers a $299 "expedited review" option. Would that count as a "paid" link if you opted for that?
And then Google recommends submitting to "other industry-specific expert sites." Many "industry specific" directories are not free. You have to pay to be listed in them. Doesn't that constitute a "paid" link? So why does Google recommend that you get listed at these sites?
Even the directories that don't require dollars to be listed usually require a link back. That's a transaction. One thing of value for another thing of value. It was bought, whether dollars changed hands or not.
Then you have sites that sell services which help you trade links with other webmasters. Is paying for those services the equivalent of "buying" links? Are the sites offering those services "selling" links, even if they're just a broker between two sites performing a transaction that neither is paying the other for (not in dollars anyway)?
And what about affiliate links? If I put an affiliate link in an article on my site to a product that I do not own, and somebody buys that product through my link, earning me and the product vendor money, did not the publisher pay for that link? He certainly gave me a monetary incentive to put the link up. Shouldn't Google be cracking down on the millions of affiliate links out there? After all, savvy vendors are using their affiliate programs to boost their rankings in Google.
I hope you're starting to see the very fuzzy line between what is and is not a "paid" link. I truly feel that Google's "slap" reaction is one of desperation, not well thought-out logical reasoning. Seriously, does Google think link buying and selling will stop because of a few site devaluations? Hardly. It'll just get even harder to detect as the sellers get smarter.
Google's actions only further confirmed what most SEO folks already knew: paid links work. If anything, Google's actions will embolden more site owners to buy links!
Google has already admitted that their algorithm cannot detect paid links. They admitted that when they started asking people to manually report paid links. If their algorithm could detect them, there'd be no reason to waste people's time reporting them, would there?
I don't fault Google for taking steps to try and preserve the integrity of their rankings. I don't want spam sites in the top results every time I use Google to search, either (and I only use Google when I search). They are the best, and I think that's great.
I just find it hypocritical that they are trying to prevent purchased links as part of those preservation efforts. Google is a multi-billion dollar corporation, not a non-profit. It is at the center of a very real online economy. Ranking well in Google means cash in the bank for businesses. As long as that is the case, there will be a market for getting ranked. As long as ranking in Google requires links, that market will be for links.
Honestly, when a government builds a new highway, do they fault the business owners who buy property alongside that highway? Do they fault the businesses for buying the biggest, most noticeable sign in order to attract the most customers? Of course not. That's business.
Again I say: Google is not a non-profit, they are a business. It seems hypocritical to me to try and instill fear into webmasters who dare view their ranking in Google the same way they view an ad they might put in a magazine: if it earns more than it costs, it's worth paying for.
That is, after all, what Google really boils down to for businesses: another source of customers.
Please leave your thoughts and comments below.
Why off-theme links have to be counted by Google.
January 28, 2008
Of all of the myths discussed in my Search Engine Myths Exposed report, the one that leaves people scratching their heads the most seems to be Myth #3, that you must get links from sites related to the same subject as yours in order to rank well in Google. I completely dispel this myth in the report.
People often walk away believing that the need for so-called "themed links" is a myth, since I demonstrate Google's glee in ranking sites with purely off-theme links in the report. Despite that, though, this reality is still confusing to many.
Why? Because from a purely logical point of view it appears to make sense that links from pages related to the same subject should hold more weight in Google. After all, a link counts as an endorsement, and an endorsement from an expert in the same field surely counts for more than one from a nobody in a different field.
How many medical products use the slogan "9 out of 10 doctors agree…" in their advertisements? Do you ever see them say "9 out of 10 plumbers agree…" when advertising the latest pharmaceutical? Of course not. That endorsement simply wouldn't hold much weight. So logically it seems that Google should be doing the same.
I think some people have the mistaken idea that I feel off-theme links count as much as on theme links. I'll be honest: I really don't know if they do. What I do know is that you don't have to get on-theme links to rank well in Google.
Why not? Why can't Google only count the "votes" from on-theme sites, since in theory they should be more valuable?
If you're thinking that it's not technically possible to do so, you're not completely wrong. It is possible, but there are problems. I personally have written code that breaks a page down into the keywords and phrases that are most represented on the page. It wouldn't be difficult to extend that out to discover the primary subjects of an entire site.
Store that information in a database and you can check outgoing links against it to see if the linking site relates to the category of the page it is linking to. If it does, count it as a vote. If not, ignore it.
Sounds simple, right? Wrong.
Let's take a look at a few search queries at Google to demonstrate why this is not so simple:
| keywords | results |
| personal page | 133,000,000 |
| newspaper | 239,000,000 |
| blog | 2,330,000,000 |
The most recent study I've seen that tried to estimate the size of the web was from the University of Iowa in the USA. That study estimated the number of indexable web pages at 11.5 billion.
But that was 3 years ago (February of 2005), so let's "guesstimate" that there are about 20 billion indexable pages on the web now. The three search queries listed above constitute 2.7 billion pages, or about 13.5% of our 20 billion "guesstimate." Each of those queries represents a kind of page that, by its very nature, will very often link out to completely unrelated sites and pages.
After all, how often will one newspaper link out to another newspaper? How often will a personal blog link out to another personal blog, or a personal page to another personal page? It happens, but the percentages are very small. In fact, just about every kind of site will often need to link to sites that are not related (directly or indirectly) to their own subject matter.
If Google was to ignore those links in favor of only links from "on theme" sites or pages, a very large percentage of the natural "votes" would be ignored. That would be diametrically opposed to Google's premise that what other sites are voting for with their links is how the web should be ranked.
If you start ignoring links because the linking site does not appear to be related to the linked-to site, you start descending into the quagmire of determining the keyword relevance of a site, such as a news site, which reports on every kind of subject imaginable. With so many subjects, the list of keywords it relates to would be huge, making such comparisons computationally expensive.
One potential way to deal with this problem would be to only compare outgoing links against the keywords that appear on the page containing the link. But that is not without difficulties, too, since it is very possible that the specific link is not semantically related, but still falls within the same category of the site (or a related category).
For example, the word "fertilizer" is not semantically related to the word "gardening" (semantics deal with the different meanings of a word or phrase, and fertilizer does not mean gardening or vice versa). However, the two words are obviously associated. What garden doesn't need fertilizer?
It's completely natural for a web page about gardening to link to a site or page about fertilizer. That's an easy association for the human brain to make, but those kinds of looser associations are much more difficult for machines to figure out.
It gets even more difficult if a site about being environmentally conscience links out to a page about fertilizer. The web is full of loose connections like that which cannot be ignored if you want an accurate index.
"Although I write primarily about arthritis pain relief, I find myself diverging into various other topics, such as swimming, cycling, weight loss, vitamins, different types of fat , comfortable furniture etc. Some might think that they have nothing to do with arthritis, but I have plenty of links from sites dealing with those topics."
–Donnie, tipsarthritispainrelief.com
So at what point is a link "off theme"? That's a very tough question to answer accurately.
If Google relied on current technology to determine on-page and on-site relevance, and ignored all links that didn't make the grade, it would lose much of what makes it better than its competition: it's democratic approach to ranking the web.
Computers are not people, and the number of associations that the search engine would have to be able to make in order to accurately count and ignore links based on relevance are astronomical. This does not rule out Google giving on-theme links more weight based on whatever associations it is currently capable of making, but I think it makes it pretty clear why Google is not presently capable of ignoring off-theme links.
Besides, just because somebody works at the grocery store doesn't mean that their vote for the best MP3 player has no merit at all. It may not have quite as much merit as a professional reviewer for PC Magazine (though some would say it has more), but it still has merit.
So really, Google simply cannot ignore off-theme links if they want to stick to their guiding principle of letting links work as "votes" for ranking the web. Considering how much easier it is to get off-theme links than on-theme ones, I for one will stick to ranking my sites the easy way.
Please leave your thoughts in a comment below.
Turn Low Quality Links into High Quality Links
January 23, 2008
These days, submission software is available to automate (or semi-automate) posting to thousands of directories. Be they article directories, link directories or otherwise, chances are there's software that will make the submission job easier.
The problem is, though, that this software usually submits to a few high quality sites and hundreds of low quality sites. The software vendors know that the more sites it submits to, the more impressive it sounds. After all, which would you be more willing to pay $97 for: software that submits to 50 directories, or software that submits to 2,500? For most people the answer is clear.
You will often find that once you've taken the time to submit to a few directories per day over many weeks or months, that Google never seems to find the links and apply them to your ranking. You spent all that time to "do it right" (because you know that submitting to hundreds or thousands of directories at once will get your links sandboxed), and yet you're not getting any love from Google.
One common reason why this is the case is because the directories you've submitted to are not crawled very often by Google. One thing that PageRank is useful for is getting a site crawled regularly, and updated pages indexed quickly. Most of the low quality sites have little or no PageRank, and so Google doesn't visit them much. If Google doesn't visit, the page with your link doesn't get crawled, the link doesn't get seen, and you get no benefit from it.
Also, my experience shows that Google limits how deep it will crawl sites like directory sites unless the sites have enough inbound links to internal pages. I have a site that has literally hundreds of thousands of pages, but Google has only indexed 61,000 despite the site having a PageRank of 4 (usually plenty to get a site crawled very often). Almost all of the links to that site point to the home page, though, and so many of the pages remain unindexed.
Take heart, though, because there's something you can do about this!
All it takes to make sure your links are seen by Google is to point a few links of your own to the pages that contain the links you want Google to know about. This is easy: just go to a site like SocialMarker.com and get a few links to each page from social bookmarking sites. Yes, you will be helping the owner of the site or directory by getting a few extra links to their site, but you will also be helping yourself because Google will find the link that remained invisible to it before.
So there you go. Add this practice to your routine of submitting to a few directories each day and you'll find that Google starts indexing the pages where your links appear much more quickly. That means the link power will be applied much more quickly, and you'll start getting some love from Google a lot sooner!
Two important notes: 1) Some directories submitted to by mass submission software use tricky tactics like preventing the links from being followed in the robots.txt file, or using the nofollow attribute in all outgoing links. So before you regularly submit to these directories, do some research to find out if they are actually applying link juice to the submissions. 2) Do not use mass submission software that submits to hundreds or thousands of places at one time. Only use software that lets you submit to a dozen or so sites of your choosing each day. Mass submission will get the links sandboxed by Google, which means Google will ignore them for a long time (months) — if they ever get counted at all.
Plast post your thoughts in a comment below!
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Jonathan Leger has been earning his living online full-time since the fall of 2004. He regularly posts advice about search engine optimization (his current passion), AdSense and Internet Marketing. 
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