Paid Text Links and the Bigger Picture
After Matt Cutt’s post Tell Me About Your Backlinks on December 9th and the ensuing post Text Link Followup on Tuesday, there has been widespread discussion about the practice of purchasing text links and quite a bit of controversy. While Google’s stance is that the practice of buying text links is an attempt to manipulate search engine results, Yahoo’s Jeremy Zawodny’s site is actively selling them. Oh the drama.

While I understand Google’s desire to improve the quality of their search results, links are nothing but another form of advertising and any SEO value that a text link may carry is only due to Google’s reliance on anchor text in determining relevancy. If Site A has built a strong user base and a significant number of inbound links to their site, why shouldn’t Site A be allowed to profit by selling links to Site B? I see this as simple capitalism evolving on the web. While there are some unscrupulous sites selling links to very low quality scraper sites, how are these any different than ordinary bad sites that link to bad sites? A high quality site selling a link to another high quality site is not devious, it’s just advertising.

I completely agree that those folks who are purchasing text links with the sole purpose of ranking low quality sites and gaming the search engines should be penalized. At the same time, there are many high-quality sites that purchase text links on relevant sites primarily for click-through value. Any SEO value is just icing on the cake and may disappear at any moment. I don't believe that sites that engage in legitimate advertising should be viewed as "losing trust" in the eyes of the search engines as Matt said.

Matt’s response to advertisers and link sellers was that text links should be designated with the “rel=nofollow” attribute and that links should be bought for potential click-through value instead of SEO value. I completely agree that links should be bought on the basis of potential click-throughs, but the "rel=nofollow" suggestion is a little more loaded.

What bothers me about Google’s stance is that they are putting the onus on site owners to improve their search results rather than adjusting their algorithm.

I know several site owners who purchase links from local newspapers and very targeted sites because they have a regionally defined audience. Most of these small sites they purchase links from have never heard of SEO and I doubt that they will be willing to add "rel=nofollow" tags to their ads. Ultimately legitimate sites that choose to advertise in this way should not have to adjust their marketing strategies to please the search engines.
Scott Woodard | permalink | +marktd |