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Blog World 2007: Paid Text Links, Google, and You
Posted by Scott on 9th November, 2007 | 10 comments
I’m at Blog World Expo today in
When Google recalculated Page Rank recently, it penalized tons of sites for selling paid links by slashing page ranks and banning some sites entirely. I attended a session here this morning titled “Advanced Money Making Strategies” and there were some interesting observations about paid links and Google.
Neil Patel of ACS SEO said that even though Google just lowered the page rank for many sites that were selling text links, organic traffic from Google to those sites didn’t decrease (according to his analysis of nine sites that incurred a page rank drop). His opinion is that the PR drop was designed to make it harder/less attractive for those sites to sell links, but in his observation, hasn’t affected organic traffic to the sites that were dinged.
Ted Murphy, CEO of PayperPost.com, made an observation about text-link-ads.com and Google. If you search Google for “text link ads”, you will see the #1 Adwords spot is text-link-ads.com, so Google has no problem taking money from them, but Google has clearly penalized their site in the organic rankings because their site is nowhere to be found in the organic search results. Murphy thinks that’s because Google is trying to protect its revenue: meaning, by hurting the text-link-ads business, they’re essentially blocking websites from improving their Google rankings (and resulting organic traffic) by gaming Google with paid back link SEO tactics. This forces sites to pay Google for PPC ads to get traffic, since they can’t get free/organic traffic.
I believe that Google is penalizing text-link-ads.com (and indeed every site owner who is selling text links) to protect its relevancy: clever SEO
The panel moderator also noticed a relationship between having paid text link ads on his site and his Google Adsense share. He claimed that the recent Google dance dropped his PR by 2 points and although his traffic didn’t drop, his Adsense $ did drop. He claims that the day he removed the paid text links, his Adsense share went back up. That sounds like hooey to me, but it’s an interesting observation nonetheless.
So what’s the solution to all this? Should you stop selling paid links? No. Just be smart about it. Don’t embed code in your page that will be simple for Google to do an index-wide search and see which sites are selling links. If the paid links network you’re working with doesn’t do this, find one that does, or just sell paid links direct to advertisers yourself (just setup a recurring Paypal subscription for each link, for instance). Embed paid links within your posts and content, not stuck over in a massive list in the sidebar. Finally, ALWAYS charge advertisers for paid links by the month, not via a one time fee.
I leave you with a photo of blogger John Chow, self proclaimed Apple hater and owner of the PC hardware site The Tech Zone, using a Mac and an iPhone at the same time:
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Friday, November 9th, 2007 at 8:15 pm and is filed under Web Business. If you like this post why not subscribe to my full text RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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I guess it would have been nice to have something “official” said about the PR system at a conference like BlogWorld Expo, but I guess not.
I keep seeing clips on the news about the conference, thanks for the update, Scott
Are you saying that selling text links without the rel=”nofollow” attr is still okay as long as you hide it well from Google, despite Google has been penalising both the sellers and brokers for reducing the relevance of Google’s search result, which is their core business?
Thanks for sharing all the information you are getting from BlogWorld.
That last paragraph and picture about John Chow had me chuckling.
“Are you saying that selling text links without the rel=”nofollow” attr is still okay as long as you hide it well from Google, despite Google has been penalising both the sellers and brokers for reducing the relevance of Google’s search result, which is their core business?”
I’m saying that google will have no way of knowing whether or not you were paid for a link as long as you are discreet - the link should look just like any other, and you shouldn’t advertise the fact that you’re selling paid links. The problem comes when you embed an automated function from someplace like text link ads to display your paid links, then google can easily see what you’re doing. All these sites use text link ads:
http://www.google.com/search?q=function+tla_ads
I’ll gladly take that iphone and macbook if Chow doesn’t want to use it.
Not only that…John Chow is wearing Shoemoney’s T-shirt…Congrats to Shoemoney!!
Scott, was the Blog World as empty as it looked in every pictures and videos posted on blogs?
LOL yes it was. I actually arrived at the beginning of the day on Friday and there was NO ONE in front of the convention center. Not one person. I went upstairs to register and again I saw like 2 people. I joked to the organizer guy “hey where is everyone” and he kind of looked at me nervously. It was definitely a small conference. They also had so many sessions, filled with so few people, that they all looked very empty. Wasn’t a bad show though, decent info, and they got some big bloggers to show up.
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Really nice shot of John Chow!