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March 31st, 2006 
QuadsZilla Those of you who read my blog know that I’m hardly a Google Apologist. I don’t buy into their “don’t be evil” hype nor do I think, like so many do, that they’re the greatest thing since sliced bread. In fact, I’m probably the last people you’d expect to see defending Matt Cutts and Google when it seems the entire webmaster / SEO community is up in arms against them.
But . . .
Matt Cutts is under fire for this Q&A:
Q: “If one were to offer to sell space on their site (or consider purchasing it on another), would it be a good idea to offer to add a NOFOLLOW tag so to generate the traffic from the advertisement, but not have the appearence of artificial PR manipulation through purchasing of links?”
A: Yes, if you sell links, you should mark them with the nofollow tag. Not doing so can affect your reputation in Google.
This isn’t really news; Matt mentioned this a while back. He even stated that Google has not trusted the links on Oreilly Publishing’s web site for quite some time because they are known to sell links.
Sure, 97% of Google’s Revenue comes from selling links. But Google is not saying “you can’t buy or sell links.” What they are saying is “If we know that you sell links, we will not value your outbound links as much in our search algorithm.”
What’s wrong with saying that? Google was built on the principle that linking to someone is like vouching for them. The more trusted sources, like the New York Times and Harvard University, count exponentially more than Joes Pizza Shop, and Mary’s Cat Blog.
The SEO marketplace realized exactly what was happening. People like me, who are into game theory, said “OK, if those are the rules, then I’ll just pay trusted sources to vouch for me.” So Google has decided to change the rules of the game – it’s their game they can do that. They figure that if they can ignore bought links, they’ll have more relevant search results and be a better Search Engine.
Essentially, Google’s just saying that “if we know that you will vouch for anyone for a buck, we’re going to trust you less.” Just like in the real world. Who would you rather trust? Someone who will say anything for a buck? or someone who will only vouch for something if they truly believed in it?
You know what? I’m happy that Matt is sharing this information with us. Sure, it’s mostly FUD because it’s often difficult to tell who sells links and who doesn’t. But I’d rather Google tells us to be discrete about link deals than wonder why that $50,000 a month link on a Page rank 10 is doing exactly nothing for me in the SERPs.
Google is right to make this move. It’s not unethical. It’s not even hypocritical. Hypocritical would be if they sold links that helped in the SERPs.
If you were Google and you were smart, you’d do the same thing. Management’s obligation is to the shareholders and the users of Google’s Search products. This is both better for the company and better for the end users. Why should Google give a crap about SEOs? We don’t pay their bills: they pay ours.
As Google gets better and better at detecting sold links, their value in SEO will deminish. Indeed, this “Google rule change” is why SEO must necessarly move more towards buzz marketing and link bait to remain competitive.
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So how do you figure Google is going to tell the difference between paid and unpaid links? I would guess that this is just going to change how paid links are placed. Instead of having a list of links under a “sponsors” heading, paid links will be blended into the content. But, you already knew that, didn’t you?
Banner spot are almost the same as link if you link use alt tag. Those that mean that they just banned self managed advertising?
The value of every website just droped because google said so.
Peter: Yea, I did a post about that when the talk of this first came up.
Amnestic: Google givith, and Google taketh away. The value of advertising on a website before Google had nothing to do with SERPs – it was how many page views and click throughs you had.
It would make sense for Google to discount links from any of the standard banner sizes. So I would reccommend against using standard sized banners if you want it to count with Google.
Great post.
I am with you QuadsZilla – paid links, no matter how you defend them, are primarily there to fool the search engines.
I think a lot of marketers will be happy to wean themselves off of the paid links. I know I love not sending that money over to TLA every month.
I am not sure if it has been stated before here, but our affiliates have done some experimentation and found that any paid links on newspaper and radio sites do not pass link juice.
So if you have ‘em, cancel ‘em. Let some other sucker pay for them.
thats why I have been working with various people on a project which is basically like googles adsense ads, except the links are spiderable (e.g. no javascript). no on really makes money with this by buying/selling links; in the end it does throw a wrench in googles ranking system–it just helps advertise and boost peoples rankings.