Googlers like to think of their company as the Web's library. But as Web sites come up with more ways to wring profit from online advertising and sales--often using methods that
Search engine marketing consultant and blogger Rand Fishkin recently compiled a list of more than 70 sites with names like LinksFactory.net and DirectoryDump.com, which have been relegated in the past three weeks to the hardly seen back pages of Google's
Links are the key scoreboard in the world of search engines: The more links a site has, the more relevant Google believes the site is--and the higher the site will rank among competing sites when someone performs a search. Higher rankings translate to more traffic, along with more online sales or higher ad rates--and ultimately more dollars.
That means that Webmasters don't just use links to point audiences to relevant content or goods and services they might buy--they also try to create links to float their site to the top of search results. Such "sponsored" or "paid" links have long made Googlers grind their teeth. Now, as Google talks tough and takes action, Web denizens are starting to protest that even Google can neither control nor even clearly define all the inappropriate links.
To most users, the difference between sponsored links and advertisements is a blur. Take, for instance, the online site for the British magazine, New Scientist. Near the bottom of the New Scientist homepage are "sponsored links" that launch the curious to odd destinations including teeth whitening sites or German language sites that sell women's shoes--places that are probably only marginally interesting to most New Scientist readers.
In the byzantine coding world of search engines, however, the mere existence of such links bumps up the placement of those particular teeth and shoe sites when someone types "white teeth" or "schuhe" into Google's search engine.
Search engines hate this kind of paid-for popularity. Google's Webmaster guidelines ban buying links just to pump search rankings. Other search engines including
But as Web commerce has boomed, so too has the value of links--for everyone, including Google. And that's lead to innovation--or from Google's perspective, scams.
The sites recently punished by Google and pushed into the practically invisible back pages of search results, for instance, are online directories filled with nothing but links. These sites, which peddle links by the hundreds or the thousands, clearly violate Google's guidelines.
But some methods of increasing the links pointing towards a site live in a murkier gray area. Orlando-based Payperpost pays bloggers as much as a thousand dollars to write reviews of companies' products. These purchased reviews--which the company says are clearly labeled as such--may well be negative. But even more important than the review may be the links embedded in the body of the text.
Mesa-Ariz.-based Text Link Brokers will pay a blogger to turn a word, such as "mortgage" in a pre-existing blog post, into a link to a mortgage-selling site. According to the company's chief executive Jarrod Hunt, clients will pay between $15 and $1,000 a month for a single link. For a full-service link-building campaign, the company charges as much as $600,000 a year.
Neither of these businesses has been penalized in Google's search results, and their linking strategies make it hard to distinguish paid links from legitimate ones. "These paid links can't be detected by people, so how could they possibly be detected by an algorithm?" Hunt says.
Since last spring, Google has been speaking out more forcefully against paid links. In April, Google senior engineer Matt Cutts asked users to report sites they spotted running paid links. "We do consider buying links to be outside of our guidelines, and be notified that we may take stronger action on that in the future," Cutts told a group of search marketers at a conference in June. "If you're a Webmaster, you can do whatever you want on your site. But as a search engine, we can do what we think is best to return a high quality index."
Reports so far indicate that only a handful of link directories have been punished, a tiny fraction of those that exist, notes Rand Fishkin. But Google's message is clear. "This is a shot across the bow from Google," he says. "They're seeing a heavy amount of manipulating, and they want to show what it looks like when they take punitive action. It's intended more as public relations than anything else."
"I don’t have a problem with Google blocking the page rank of spammy, link-selling sites," Text Link Broker's Jarrod Hunt says. "But I don't agree with the fear-mongering part of all this, scaring Webmasters into thinking they can't sell links."
At the Search Engine Strategies conference earlier this month, search marketer Michael Gray gave a presentation titled: "Are Paid Links Evil: A Tale of Propaganda and Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt." Gray argued that search marketers have no responsibility to cooperate in Google's campaign against buying and selling links, and accused Google of using its "don't be evil" motto to manipulate search marketers and boost its own advertising business.
"Google tells us we're polluting the Internet," Gray says. "In fact, we're just messing with their algorithm. Google created an algorithm that puts all its weight in links. That's their problem, not ours." Gray chafes at what he sees as an effort by Google to cut into his revenue--particularly when the company profits handsomely from its own version of paid links through its Adwords service. Adwords advertisements appear adjacent to Google's search results and account for most of the company's $13 billion revenue.
But unlike hidden paid links, says Google's Matt Cutts, Adwords advertisements don't bias Google's search results. And when it comes to producing unbiased answers, what's good for Google is good for users, he insists. "I think the reason people come to Google is the quality of the search results," he says. "Users don't want to see results sorted by who has the biggest pocketbook."
Danny Sullivan, a search industry expert and blogger for Search Engine Land, concurs with Cutts: There's nothing nefarious about Google's protecting its user-focused emphasis on relevant results, he says. But Sullivan agrees with other search experts who say that Google's goal of eventually filtering all paid links from its search results is misleading. Distinguishing between legitimate and paid links embedded in text is practically impossible, especially on the scale of Google's massive index of every Web site.
"Google will never be able to stop paid links altogether," Sullivan says. "They'll stop the obvious stuff. They'll create a climate of fear and a sense of responsibility. But some will still get through."
Apostolos Gerasoulis, executive vice president of search technology at Google competitor Ask.com is equally pessimistic about the search industry's battles with Webmasters who manipulate results. He says that Ask doesn't suffer from paid links schemes as much as Google, thanks to an algorithm that only counts links between sites about the same subject. But sites that manipulate search results, he says, plague the entire industry. Google's public criticism of such tactics won't make them go away.
"We know better than to say anything," Gerasoulis says. "The more pressure you put on them, the smarter they become. This war between spam sites and the search engines has no end."