Selling Links - Not the way to go.

With a lot of chatter, arguement and debate on the subject of paid links, the debates seemed to have reignited this week wen it came to light that Google have confirmed they are penalising sites that sell links.

Paid links, those that are put on a site in return for a fee, have often been a way of raising a site's credibility, PageRank and exposure extremely quickly. The problem with this is that the democratic nature of search engines is usurped by those with the most money to splash around. If we imagine a Google search as a democratic system where the most popular sites appear at the top of the rankings, links become votes. The more links to a site, the more search engines perceive it as a destination, a place people want to go to. When money exchanges hands, extra votes can be bought and extra influence & greater standing in the search engine ranks can be gained.

There is a case to be made for paid links. For one, Google uses paid links to conduct its Adwords campaign and links are a highly valuable advertising tool. The differene between these adverts and paid links, however, is that adverts are often clearly marked. In a newspaper, adverts are separated from content & media owners disassociate themselves from the advertised content. The media outlet isn't recommending a product in an advert, the advertiser is. Paid links muddy this issue in order to work. In order to influence Google's PageRank system, these links must be like any other on a website. the advertised content and the publised content are indistinguishable.

Danny Sulliavan reported at Search Engine Land that Google have begun to talk about lowering the PageRank of those companies that have been selling links and it would appear that they intend to do this more in the future. It would be hard to identify a lot of the sites that sell links but it is not a valuable long-term strategy as far as search engine optimization is concerned as the penalties are reduced visibility in the Search Engines but, more importantly, lowered trust within your community, something that can tarnish you for a long time. There is no real sens in mixing up paid content & free content & it gives a skweed view of the Internet if you link to sites whose only intrinsic value is the money that the links were bought with.


Adverts but without advertising