I’m writing this article because I think that a lot of people did not understand yet that Online Advertising (which includes Paid Links) is driving the Internet. There are still many people that fear that Paid Links will loose they value because they read a recent post written by Matt Cutts about this topic. You have to read this post more carefully…it all depends on the purpose you are buying links. In this article I write down my personal point of view about this post. Matt Cutts recently stated:
If someone is buying text links to try to rank higher on search engines, they’re already doing something intended more for search engines than for users. If you finish that guideline, you’ll see that it’s talking about doing radically different things for engines versus users (for example, cloaking or creating doorway pages). It would be a misinterpretation of that guideline to think “Okay, I can only do things for users, I can never do things for search engines. Therefore I can buy text links, but not in a way that doesn’t affect search engines.” That same philosophy would mean that you wouldn’t create a robots.txt file (users don’t check those), never make any meta tags (users don’t see meta tags), never create an XML sitemap file (users wouldn’t know about them), and wouldn’t create web pages that validate (users wouldn’t notice). Yet these are all great practices to do. So if you want to buy links, I’d buy them for users/traffic, not for PageRank/search engines.
Focus your attention on the sentence in bold. This is nothing new! Google was always against selling links for PageRank, but how can they know if you are buying a link for PageRank or traffic? If I want to place a link to my site on a website that gets thousands of visits each day and also has a PageRank of 6, how can they know if I’m buying it for traffic purposes or PageRank purposes? They could assume that a link for traffic is placed in a position where people could easily click on it and links for PageRank are placed in the footer for example. In my honest opinion it is impossible for Google to say whether you bought a link for PageRank or for traffic. Another solution could be to place a “nofollow” tag on each paid link, but actually Google is indexing links with a “nofollow” tag…
And what about Paid Web Directories?
I’ll try to give a few rules of thumb to think about when looking at a directory. When considering submitting to a directory, I’d ask questions like:
- Does the directory reject urls? If every url passes a review, the directory gets closer to just a list of links or a free-for-all link site.
- What is the quality of urls in the directory? Suppose a site rejects 25% of submissions, but the urls that are accepted/listed are still quite low-quality or spammy. That doesn’t speak well to the quality of the directory.
- If there is a fee, what’s the purpose of the fee? For a high-quality directory, the fee is primarily for the time/effort for someone to do a genuine evaluation of a url or site.
How can Google know if a Web Directory is rejecting 25% of all submissions? Anyway, why are Web Directories different from other websites? The fee I pay to get my site listed inside a Web Directory is for the time/effort for someone to do a genuine evaluation of a url or site. But websites that are different from Web Directories can’t sell links? What if they invest the money earned with paid links to guarantee the quality of their website and to make it more user friendly? How can Google know for what purpose they are selling links on their site?
Coming back to what I’ve said before (placing the “nofollow” tag on paid links), this would mean that Web Directories are allowed to sell links without the “nofollow” tag while other websites would need to use this tag. This is called DISCRIMINATION!
Today I received a comment from one of my readers (or from someone that accidently came across my blog ) regarding the contest I’ve started 2 weeks ago :
OK, the idea is a lot like John Chow’s but are you sure you want to do this? You might get in trouble with Google, you know… No matter how you look at this, you are paying for links, and you know that Matt Cutts encourages people to report paid links.
Btw: John Chow’s strategy worked for a while, but did you check the first page of google.com for “make money online” lately? Yes. He dropped. Big time. Despite his over 1000 links for this keyword phrase.
Sure, there are many factors which could have influenced the drop, but I have reasons to believe that this is the most important one.
Anyway… good luck with the contest.
Here is my answer:
I’m actually not sure I want to do this…I already did this. The contest will end in a few days. Matt Cutts even stated that Paid directories are ok. Have you read his post about paid links? How many webmaster were against it? 99%?
The whole Internet is driven by paid links and online advertising, not even Google has the power to stop paid links. and Matt Cutts knows that perfectly. What about sites like “Review me” “TLA” “Pay-per-post” (and these are only “small websites” compared to others selling links) ? What about “Yahoo directory” and “Business.com” wich is an AUTHORITY website in Google and is worth hundreds of millions of dollars? Do you really think Google would ban these sites because they are selling links?
Regarding John Chow the only reason because he dropped for “make money online” is that he got so many backlinks in a short time that it seemed to be ” Google Bomb”. This has absolutly NOTHING to do with paid links.
Here is a quick tip of mine: please read Matt Cutts blog more carefully.
This is the way I think about this. How can Google know if someone that linked to me, did it to spread the information or because I paid him secretly to place that link inside his content? It is impossible!
Another very interesting sentence I found in Matt Cutts’s post is:
Google’s quality guidelines say “Make sites for users, not search engines.”
Search Engine Optimization is not needed anymore (even if there are a lot other search engines, Google monopolized this market and all SEO websites focus on how how you can rank higher in Google). So the millions of websites about this subject can now shut down?
But wait a minute…isn’t there a service called Google Adwords where you CAN PAY to rank always on the first position for certain keywords? Did I miss something or is Goolge SELLING LINKS?
Finally have a look what Matt Cutts says at the end of the post:
One rule of thumb is that if a link seller is talking about how hard it is to find a paid link or how paid links are made so that no one will know, that’s probably a bad sign to Google
I think that everyone is free to write down his thoughts. I’m running a Web Directory and I’m selling links on it. I reject every kind of websites that are not family friendly, illegal or that were build only for Adsense.
I’m also selling links on this blog. Even if I love to blog and to help other webmasters with my articles, I have to pay designers, coders, domain names and hosting fees to keep the quality of my websites high and to make them user friendly. I’m blogging for free and I’m spending a lot of time to find useful information for my readers. I’m not forcing anyone to give me some money for my affords. But is it really wrong if some people decide to advertise on my blog or one of my other websites and if I take this money to guarantee the quality of my work? IS THIS REALLY WRONG?
