Over the past few days, it’s been interesting to see what has transpired on Matt Cutts’ blog on the topic of selling links to boost site link popularity. For those who don’t know who Matt Cutts is, he is a well-known Google engineer to many SEO experts who regularly networks and shares his insights on what’s happening with Google.
First, a brief history on this topic before we get deeper into a discussion on the above post on selling text links. As was reported by Danny Sullivan, the editor at SearchEngineWatch.com, well-known publisher O’Reilly came under fire recently for selling high PageRank links on their site. It caused such an uproar that O’Reilly decided not to sell any more text links on their site. This all in an effort to not appear as a participant in the search engine spam parade. This raised philosophical issues on when it is “fair” or “ethical” to sell links on websites.
The links were clearly visible and not hidden, yet some felt that as a trusted site, it should not have placed unrelated links like the ones on travel. O’Reilly chief Tim O’Reilly stated that the sites were found to be using O’Reilly as main back-link sources rather than for direct advertising click-throughs like a regular ad. A suggestion to use the rel=”nofollow” tag (this was developed for the main purpose of reducing spam on blogs) on the link to appear as a non-participant in a link spamming scheme raised many ethical issues.
Links have been traded and sold even before the search engines like Google existed and links were considered to have any direct effect on rankings. As the webmaster and owner of a site the search engine considers valuable, how unethical is it to sell links in order to monetize the site and generate revenue to support more development? Furthermore, who’s to say whether relevancy is important?
To confuse the situation farther, Google says in it’s webmaster guidelines to buy links from competitor search engine Yahoo as follows:
Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.
Perhaps the directory categorizing keeps these links relevant and it’s OK. What about the use of directories to include smaller, lesser known sites so as to help them acquire link popularity through aggressive reciprocal link building campaigns? Google seems to have discounted the effect of these directories as was noted when a DMOZ directory category received a PR-0. Some directory webmasters also reported the PR zeroing of their directory sites as well. Who has the right to determine what sites are scraper sites that need to be dropped from the SERPs? What criteria would you use since most sites like the news sites are scraper sites anyways? Why should a search engine make the rules on what webmasters should do with their private sites? These are tough questions to answer and there are many viewpoints out there.
From a personal standpoint, I’d say that Google indirectly influenced the marketplace by placing a value on linking and PR. As with any business and market place, when there is demand so will supply follow. Thus, the advent of text link brokers and link sellers. These are just natural market forces in motion. Instead of trying to make webmasters follow Google’s self-imposed rules, it should explore new methods of establishing site relevance. Google is not the web. It is only a piece of it. It provides a service that makes the web more useable. Granted, people will always try to game the search engines, but this is the reality of any business. There will always be people out there trying to find a shortcut or a backdoor to success.
Google doesn’t like links sold with the intent of gaming the search engines as stated in it’s guidelines. It is difficult to establish true intent of a link. Without human editors, it’s unlikely that search engine algorithms will be smart enough to discern what the intent of links truly are. It would have to hire a large number of human editors to seek out websites which is not likely to be feasible. What happens if Google decides to penalize based on an algorithm that takes into account link selling but the actual link on a site was done with different intentions? The innocent site would be penalized. This can be a huge dilemma for Google to deal with if it were to continue down this path of attempting to neutralize such links.
As the discussion deepens, it begins to appear to many Google is trying to create it’s own rules and expects everyone to follow it – creating resentment by many webmasters and SEOs alike.