Matt Cutts made a post about reporting paid links recently that pissed off a lot of people - including me.

For the record, I have never purchased a link. Not even for clients. Why pay when there are so many ways to get links for free?

So why does Matt’s post bug me? Because I don’t think paid links are a bad thing. I think paid links are commerce. I think that just because a link is paid for does not mean it is “bad” or “evil”. And I honestly don’t see why Google is choosing this fight when there are so many other more damaging practices out there spamming up the SERPs that have been around longer that still aren’t getting filtered out. Beyond that, I think Google’s link policies are getting silly and it is exerting its influence for selfish reasons. And they are hypocrites.

Links are commerce, and like the headline says, “there is no such thing as a free link”. I should know - I give them away (free) at Linkers Union. While I don’t charge cash for those links, there is a cost: the site owner has to contact me and ask for the link. That takes time. And it isn’t like I’m all that altruistic about giving away links. Free links promote good will and, well, the site you are promoting. Giveaways = traffic.

And what is a “paid link”?

Is it just cash or would a paid review count? At SES in Chicago last year, panelists from the 4 major search engines all claimed to have no problem with paid posts. Paid reviews generally include at least one link.

Even linkbait comes from the idea where something of value is given in hopes of gaining links. Or put another way, your cool content be it informative or entertaining is paid for by the links you pick up.

Google clearly threw the gauntlet down on link exchanges a couple years ago when reciprocal links got depreciated. While I think reciprocal linking was getting a bit out of hand I don’t necessarily agree that penalizing those links is a good solution. People naturally link back to sites that link to them. Sometimes it is a courtesy (thanks!) and sometimes it’s to show off a bit (look who linked to me!). There’s nothing wrong with that and shame on Google for making educated webmasters think twice about it.

Google’s results are not the most relevant (try Yahoo! and see for yourself). The cause is… links. The Google SERPs are not based on relevancy. They are based on popularity, specifically link popularity (thanks Michael for putting it so nicely). Link pop is the basis of PR and what defines your position in the results more than all other factors combined.

Because Google puts so much (too much?) faith in links they must now try to control them. One way is with the addition of the “nofollow” attribute. The nofollow attribute is to be placed on any link you have on your site that points to a site that may be questionable. This protects you from accidentally pointing to a bad neighborhood. But it reduces the natural conversation of the internet and it flies in the face of Google’s own guidelines:

Make pages for users, not for search engines.

If search engines didn’t exist there would be no “nofollow” attribute. Quite a paradox.

Especially when Google got busted selling PageRank on their own site. And Google recently purchased DoubleClick which own Performics which is an SEO company who purchases paid links.

So what is the real motivation behind banning paid links? I couldn’t imagine.

How many angles of the industry is Google going to get into? How sick am I of hearing them say “do no evil” when clearly they are?

Finally, by making webmasters scared to buy links the cost of links will only increase. More risk equals greater reward. This is yet another obstacle for small businesses and start-ups to overcome making the internet easier to dominate for big-budget companies.

My advice as an SEO is to play along. My advice as a human being with a vested interest in seeing the internet evolve naturally is to not buy into this crap.

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