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Blog World 2007: Paid Text Links, Google, and You

I’m at Blog World Expo today in Las Vegas. It’s a new and fairly small conference, but it is packed full of sessions and a lot of big time Internet business folks are here: Leo Laporte (of TechTV and TWiT Podcast fame) gave the opening keynote this morning, and both John Chow and Jeremy Schoemaker are here. Although John Chow and I go way back – he was an esteemed user of my SysOpt.com site where he held the title of the fastest recorded benchmark scores for his PC – I had the pleasure of meeting both John and his wife Sarah for the first time today.

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 marketers and those that buy text links are gaming Google to build back-links and to artificially boost page ranks, ensuring that junk sites rank higher than quality content. That’s what Google wants to prevent: they don’t want the relevancy and usefulness of their engine to go into the toilet due to SEO people gaming organic rankings. So it’s not just revenue motivated, it’s Google trying to protect its algorithm and its usefulness.

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.