Google’s War Has Not Ended Paid Links, its Just Made Them Less Transparent
When this war against paid links was publicly launched last year one of the biggest concerns I had was that it would simply push the paid link marketplace underground. Before the first salvo was fired text link brokers generally operated out in the open and those selling links were transparent in showing which links were paid. Generally you would see a list of links under the heading Sponsored or with some other identifying so that visitors would know that those links were paid for. However with Google showing no mercy by punishing sites for selling paid links, brokers and sellers have decided to be less transparent and often obscure the nature of their paid links. Plenty of sites simply removed the headings that allowed Google to easily identify the links as paid and continued to sell Page Rank passing links on their sites.
Google simultaneously pressured sellers to begin using nofollow protocol on their links – HTML code which basically tells search engines not to include the link when computing the target’s rankings in their search index. The controversy here is that just because a link is paid for doesn’t mean that it is irrelevant. Still Google threatens to punish sites that refuse to add nofollow to their paid links regardless of relevance.
Paid Links Still Work
In my own backlink research I have found that paid links continue to affect Google’s search engine results despite these stepped-up initiatives. Many of the sites that I looked at had a few editorial links but over 90% of links reported were obviously paid links with extremely targeted anchor text. I took a look at the search engine results using the targeted anchor text used in these links and found the sites in question were ranking very well for those keywords. Keep in mind that I was looking at some highly competitive search phrases.
One of the main culprits was a decent enough site but nowhere near a leader in their industry. In my opinion this site did not deserve to rank ahead of some of its bigger competitors. They were not as well known as the industry leaders and their on-site optimization was no better than the others. Their high ranking was achieved simply because they had thousands of anchor text rich paid links pushing them to the top of the rankings.
So what’s the answer?
At Reprise Media we would not counsel our clients to do the quick fix paid linking solution. Yes, it does work, but only as long as you pay for it and there is always the chance that Google will punish your site. The work that it would take to re-build your site’s trust and ranking with Google is simply not worth the risk. Just as important is the need for relevance. It is possible to obtain relevant paid links but in many cases this is not what happens in practice. Though you may increase the flow of linkjuice with paid links the user experience can be compromised and we believe that good marketing has to take this into account. Finally we believe that tricking your users is rarely a good idea – eventually information has a way of surfacing online and the resultant negative publicity is not worth the initial deception.
That being said, there is an argument for in favor of paid links beyond the fact that they do work. Clearly Google’s tactics aren’t working so why not do what has worked in many other asymmetric conflicts around the world and call a truce.
Google ought to allow paid links that are:
1) Clearly identified as such
2) Relevant
These links would be exempt from their nofollow policy. All other paid links – beware! This won’t stamp out paid link spam but it will bring many of these actors back into the light and serve to encourage relevant links – key to the user experience that Google is so concerned about.
Google still needs to find a way to identify paid links or tweak their algorithm to make links less important. Of course with links being the backbone of the Google’s algorithm this is improbable. It may take a community effort or a new service that helps webmasters identify paid links and report them to Google. Certainly by making a distinction between relevant and irrelevant links the online community will have more incentive to report links that don’t follow the protocol I’m suggesting. If Google wants to tackle the paid links issue they must come up with a better solution.
