My goodness. You don’t have to look far to find a lot Google bashing in regard to penalizing link sellers. It’s a pretty big topic right now, and you can’t waste countless hours of company-paid time on Sphinn without seeing at least three posts on the subject (umm…I mean after work). A lot of bloggers are pretty upset, and rightfully so, I think. But does the move to penalize bloggers for selling links that pass PageRank make Google evil?
Let’s look at some of the issues. In one corner, you have a lot of people that believe that there is a real problem when Google is penalizing sites that sell links. I mean, why can’t I sell links? It’s my site. Right? Right. Now, you’re going to penalize my site because I’m selling links? What the hell?
And then, in the other corner, you have Google. Hey, those links you are selling don’t have a nofollow tag. They are getting PR this way, and manipulating our index. We are getting crappy sites pulling up all over the place. For heaven’s sake, what if someone has a tumor?
So, who’s right? Well, both of us, them, we, I, and you. Each side has some really good arguments. Like, how the hell does Google know that this link is sold? And what if I whole heartedly believe in this link? Maybe I want it to do better to share with the rest of my online brethren. Or, Google thinks, why on Earth would you write a review on a spammy product, telling everyone you believe in it, without doing any research on the product, taking your money, screwing up our results, and spamming the place up?
In the end, we have to remember something. Google is a company. They have an interest to protect, and they are taking the actions to do so. It’s easy to think that they owe us something, and they do. But they don’t owe us as bloggers or SEO’s, they owe us as users. So imagine, if you will, that Google let the whole paid links debate go, and removed all restrictions on the practice. I don’t know about most of you, but I would run out of money long before some other larger companies did, and they would outrank me rather quickly. To me, I would think that Google could come up with a better way of determining quality other than broadly punishing the practice of selling links, but for the time they aren’t. It sucks to think that they probably won’t. It’s just too easy for them to act in the way they are, and it protects their own ad sales as a bonus. So, what do we do?
If you want the Google traffic, don’t sell links. Or at least outsmart them as long as you can. If you are more concerned with the revenue, then there are plenty of other ways to get traffic. As an insight, I can tell you that Stumble and Sphinn have both sent me more traffic in the last 2 months than Google has in the last 6. I believe that this whole thing is going to bite Google in the ass anyway, in this. I look at my clients with a black and white view when it comes to advertising. A) we work for the revenue from paid ads, or B) we don’t. If we do, AdSense isn’t exactly the route I would suggest, and Google isn’t the major target of traffic generation. So, we find our way of driving the right visitor without regard to Google (Ban the site, who cares?), and we find our success. Or, we don’t worry about advertising as the site is probable selling a product directly, and optimize and market with Google in mind. Either way, we win, and in this example, Google loses.
I believe that if more bloggers and site owners took this same practice of non-AdSense/non-Google ad marketing, then they would soon see that they need to come up with something better. For as long as we are attempting to rank in Google, use AdSense with other paid links, get banned, bitch about it, then try to do it again with a few new tricks, then get banned…you get the idea. They are still winning. Get a little AdSense money here, ban a site, get some more AdSense money, rinse, repeat. And as much as I like (not love) Google, I don’t want them to win this one. I want them to come up with another way.
If I want to sell a link, and it’s of quality to me, that should be my business without consequence to my rankings. They should be working on the quality thing themselves, not finding examples to make and taking the easy way out.
Now, I’m not supporting or bashing Google in any way. They have decided on their moves, and I have decided on mine. It’s business. This doesn’t make them evil (at least this doesn’t). When it comes to their index, they have made the rules, and when I’m in ‘Google SEO’ mode, I play by them. When I’m in ‘Get traffic for ad revenue’ mode, I couldn’t care less about Google. No need to argue with them. Let them do what they will, and I will do what I will.
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