SES San Jose included a session on link purchasing Tuesday that included Matt Cutts of Google. The panel covered the pros and cons of link purchasing and Google’s policy of blocking paid links. This issue is hot and Google’s motives are clearly selfish.
Cutts started by pointing out that paid links violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This is odd because the guidelines do not say anything about buying or selling links. The closest reference to link buying is this part near the bottom:
Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
The emphasis here is on your outbound links and to avoid linking to sites that may be offensive. There is nothing about link sales. If you stretch the meaning of the first sentence you might say that selling links could make you part of a “link scheme” but even that would increase the PR of the site you link to - not your own.
Cutts went on to explain that not disclosing paid advertisements offline is against the policies of the FCC. Maybe Google has been working with China too long but here in America we don’t take kindly to the government approving our content. This is an obvious scare tactic - reveal your paid links or we’ll sick the government on you! Can you imagine the Department of Homeland Security digging through websites to discover the very real and dangerous threat of paid links?!
It makes me wonder if Google is lobbying for legislation on this issue. They have the cash for it. But most websites are good about letting users know how the site works by including a disclosure or advertising policy of some sort.
Google would like to see a label for paid links like “sponsored links” or “advertising links” along with technology to block the bots from following those links like using the robots.txt file, 302 redirects, JavaScript or the infamous “nofollow” attribute.
The use of robots.txt, 302 redirects and JavaScript do the job for Google. Their bots don’t read that information so there is no problem. The use of a nofollow is a bit more sinister and shows the weakness of Google’s algorithm: Google can’t tell what the purposes of links are without help.
As Michael Gray pointed out at the conference, the use of nofollows was to control links on public sites like forums or blogs. The whole site could be penalized if the search engines found a bad link. My impression was that the nofollow attribute was a temporary solution but not the ultimate fix because the first Basic Principle of Google’s Quality Guidelines is:
Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.”
The nofollow attribute does present different information to users than it does to search engines. When search engines find nofollowed links they move on effectively ignoring them. Users don’t see the attribute and can’t see a distinction between regular and nofollowed links (unless you get a plug-in for your browser). I see this as a mini-cloak to manipulate search engines that does the user no good at all.
Cutts compared paid links to littering or using the carpool lane with just one person - acts that have a negative impact on society. How about the impact of a bully threatening kids for their lunch money? I think that’s a much better analogy of Google’s anti-link buying tactics… Scare webmasters with smaller sites into thinking that selling links is evil and punishable by Google.
Cutts then went on to say that link-sellers are scumbags and that Google was very good at detecting paid links. More fear tactics I guess because if Google was so good at detecting paid links why would they bother fighting with them so much? Why would they ask people to report paid links? Why all the drama leading up to this announcement?
As of this writing Google’s stock is priced at $512.75 per share. Google makes it’s money by selling links. Let’s rock the hypocrisy, shall we?
Adwords is Google’s primary money-maker. Adwords works by bidding for key words and when those words appear on a site displaying Adsense (the publisher side of Adwords) your ad appears. The viewer may click the ad which then charges your account. The more you bid the more your ad appears the more clicks you get and more money Google makes. The ads are links to your site.
One of the issues is defining what a “punishable paid link” is. If someone offers cash for a link on your site then that link is paid for and presumably punishable. But what about paid directories like the Yahoo Directory? Google’s Webmaster Guidelines show that this is acceptable:
Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.
Here Google is encouraging paid links. They claim that because Yahoo’s directory is human-edited with quality guidelines it is ok. It seems the rest of us are not able to create or enforce such guidelines for our own sites. I’m shocked Google has such a low opinion of us!
Google is missing the fact that every link, paid for or not, is edited for quality and content. Even on automated sites there are people behind the systems that decide what will best serve their viewers. Google is in effect saying that most webmasters are not able to do what is best for their users.
Is a paid review a paid link? Paid reviews are a standard advertising practice and oddly, Google is fine with paid reviews even though a link to the product being reviewed is a given.
Maybe linkbait or SEO efforts are paid links? After all, the links wouldn’t exist if someone didn’t work and get paid for that work to get them. What about PR companies? Their work usually returns links from prestigious news sites.
What if you want to buy something and a link is thrown in? Google has been caught selling high-profile links several times. I guess their rules for link-selling only apply to the rest of us. Or the rules are too hard for them to understand themselves. Or maybe, the money in link-sales is just too good to pass up. Now every time I buy something online I need to see if some bastard is going to link to my site and get me in trouble. In fact, I should ask my web host to remove this testimonial I wrote about their great service. I’d hate for them to get in trouble for my kind words.
All of this confusion comes down to Google having an unstable product, and insatiable apatite for profit and the mentality of an overgrown 10-year-old trying to bully the rest of us into submission. The “don’t sell links” policy is a bad call. Link selling has been around long before Google. Trying to close the door for this legitimate source of revenue for website owners builds dependence on Adwords.
If I purchase a link I deserve the full value of that link including any side-effects a third-party site (like a search engine) may throw my way. If I ever paid for links they would be on sites that have viewers that I want to attract so that I get the best ROI. That should fit nicely within Google’s “quality guidelines”. Or if I want to just throw money out there for attention that would be creating a cultural phenomenon just like in the offline world and there is nothing wrong with that! It’s the American way.
If I put the time, money and energy into building a site that other people want to purchase links from I should have the right to sell those links. I should not have to do extra work to appease a third-party site that says I should build my site like they don’t exist. And I should be smart enough to know that any links on my site will have an effect on the quality of my site (read: editorial control). And that if I link to sites that are no good my site will suffer for it in the form of fewer site visitors, fewer people willing to link to my site and a drop in search rankings naturally all without special controls from Google’s “we want your money task force”.
This policy is alienating Google from its market of suppliers (website owners). Google’s attempt to dictate policy to the rest of the internet is a bad move especially when they clearly have so much to gain if the rest of us fall in line. This policy is highlighting Google’s greed.
If another company made such a claim they would be ignored. If Microsoft tried something similar the backlash would be huge. As it is, Google is playing off of what is left of their small start-up done good/do no evil image but there isn’t much left of that image left now that the company is 10 years old and worth billions.
If Google put their resources into removing the need for a nofollow tag when it was first released instead of finding new ways to use it the internet would be a better place with all spammers having a more difficult time getting bad links through.
If Google wants to provide a better product they need to come up with the solutions on their end and stick with telling webmasters to “Make pages for users, not for search engines.”
If Google focused on new product development and improving their existing ones instead of telling the rest of us how to not make money everyone would be happier including the users and shareholders.
The best way I can think of to combat this bad policy is to do exactly what you’d do if someone else suggested it: ignore it. After all, that is exactly what Google has been telling us to do all along and they certainly can’t punish a website for working within their guidelines, right?
PS. Thanks to Rand at SEOmoz for his great coverage of SES and the inspiration behind this post.
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