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Paid Links Are Spam?
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Posted by: forwardone
Google’s Matt Cutts raised quite some controversy in his blog by telling people how to report paid links. (Use the spam report form and include the word “paidlinks”.) He disclaims that this is just an experiment to collect more data at this point, but it still leaves a bad taste among many of the commenters on Matt’s post. When Matt talks about reporting “paid links” as opposed to e.g. “spammy paid links,” it leaves us to think that paid links in general aren’t wanted by Google.
Paid links, you may ask? Aren’t those the things on Google search results, powered by AdWords? Do we have to report Google search results now, as Roger Browne comments?
No, Google is attacking specifically those links which are “real” links – the way the World Wide Web Consortium tells people to link. Links which aren’t using JavaScript, or rel="nofollow” attributes, or any other means that render them inaccessible (or put up a warning flag) with certain tools*. Links which, incidentally, are used by some of the AdWords competitors out there – like Text-Link-Ads.com, for example.
The reasoning behind this is that Google suspects some of these linking schemes to be set up to game search engines, because “real” links happen to trigger Google’s algorithms to transfer PageRank from one site to another... and Google rightfully tends to ban stuff that games search engines. (Yes, paid text links which are real links may increase the chance your site’s in trouble in Google’s rankings.)
But are all webmasters who use paid links trying to spam search engines?
Let’s reiterate some of the history of this issue. Back in, say, 2004, when a webmaster wanted to sell ads on their site (and – gasp – they didn’t want to use Google!), they might have sold text links on their own, or through a third-party system. If the webmaster believed that the W3C defines the web standards, and they wanted to create the most accessible types of links, they used the “a” element. Now switch to 2005, when Google, MSN, Yahoo and others – but not the W3C – united to introduce a new attribute value, the “nofollow” (to battle comment spam, by the way, not link ads!). All of a sudden, those webmasters who only worked with W3C recommendations, specifically not writing their web pages for search engines, were somehow suspect – they were suddenly, if ever so slighty, marked as “spammer.” This wasn’t made explicit, but Matt’s latest post, for instance, does make it more explicit.
To repeat: without doing any single change on their site, the webmaster who didn’t keep up with search news in 2005 is now suspect. She might’ve had a text ad on her blog about sailing which was intended to be there for her human audience, a link reading “buy a sailing boat” leading to a site which the author even trusted. (A relevant link – this is more than I can say of many of the random sites AdSense display, which are often leading to very weird pages.)
The thing is: some paid links are intended to game the web and reap revenue without added value to end users. But you know what? Some AdSense too are intended to game the web and reap revenue without added value. There are tens of thousands to millions of AdSense-based spam farms out there which make it harder for search engines like Technorati to find good content. Please, Yahoo, MSN, Ask and Technorati: give me a spam report form where I can paste the keyword “adsense”. And make sure you post something on your respective company blogs, or unofficial employee blogs, that communicates to people, implicitly or explicitly, that using AdSense might get your search rankings in trouble.