SEOmoz | The Paid Links Debate Rages On - SES San Jose 2007

The basic argument that search engineers in general, and Matt Cutts in particular, has presented is that paid links represent manipulation and pollution in the index. The links are not "editorially vouching" for the quality and relevancy of the pages they point to, but due to the ulterior motive of financial compensation, adversely affect the quality of search results.

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Are Paid Links Evil?" was the wrong question to ask. Rather, in his opinion, a more proper question would be "Do paid links that pass PageRank violate search engines' quality guidelines?" And the answer, according to Matt, is that since 2005, Google has been explicitly clear that the answer is "Yes."

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those who link to sources from which they have received compensation should be labeled in one of the following ways:

• Use a redirect through URL blocked by robots.txt

• Redirect through a URL using a 302

• Use Javascript to direct the link

• Apply the rel=”nofollow” attribute to the link

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He notes the following pitfalls:

• Links that are bought for a limited time (may not provide long term value)

• Links that are "run of site" which Google is very good at finding and eliminating

• Links that are purchased from "sloppy sellers" who link to bad sites and bad neighborhoods

• Links that are bought from sellers that cloak the links only to you, so Google never sees them

• Buying links that can be found and reported by a competitor

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At the core of Michael's anti-Google sermon was the following series of arguments:

• Both commercial and non-commercial queries exist on the web
• Commercial websites are NOT generally linked-to naturally
• Non-commercial websites are much more likely to entice natural links
• By eliminating paid links, Google will fill the top results for commercial queries with primarily non-commercial results
• Thus, when a searcher wishes to take a commercial action, the only relevant results will be the paid listings
• And, thus, searchers will be more likely to click on AdWords links, which earn Google money

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If link purchases have a positive ROI for a company, they'll continue to make them. If they have a positive ROI, chances are good that they must also be serving the searcher effectively and thus, be good results for the engines.

In a worst-case scenario, you flush your money down the drain - this isn't so bad, as those links can still send traffic, branding and may work at multiple engines (not just Google)

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