Large companies with an extensive web presence, newspaper companies for example, have realised the value not of adverts, banners etc, but of links. The latest offering was for 40 links added to articles in their news pages over a 12 month period for £3000.

Apart from being unethical, what these companies are doing is ensuring only companies with deep pockets can buy the links and benefit from them, assuming they work.

I mentioned in a previous post that we’d nearly succumbed to the charms of a corporate link pimp but thankfully we saw the light before it was too late. Mind you, this ethical stance is expensive, there’s good profit to make re-selling this stuff and we’re missing out! So Matt Cutts, come on fella, nail these bloody people!

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To cut a long story short we were approached by a very large publisher who has a number of web properties offering article space in return for a fee. Each article presented a link building opportunity and the links were not NO FOLLOWED.

The web properties in question are already heavily monetised but the publisher – a well know and large organisation – has realised the value of links and decided to cash in. In short these greedy bastards don’t give a damn about the ethics or Google’s clear statements about not selling links that pass pagerank.

This once again begs the question of what Google can do about situations like this and I wonder if they can do anything at all. Apart from me and the link pimp nobody would have known any cash changed hands and as such no proof the link had been purchased.

Sure enough the page itself clearly states the article to be an advertorial (heaven forfend anyone should confuse link spam as quality journalism) but will Google’s spiders make that distinction.

I’ve ranted many times about link spam even referring to it as Internet Cancer but even I was almost seduced by this latest offer, it’s just so easy, hand over some cash, write some words, get some links.

Anyway, this close scrape has re-enforced my commitment to stay on the right side of the line where link building is concerned sticking firmly to the ethical SEO approach we have always adopted. So far as our clients are concerned we are very happy to point them at link spammers if they don’t see things our way.

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There are also a shed load of people who have created crap websites in the hope of generating an income from Google Adsense or from affiliate marketing. It’s all about creating crap nobody needs to generate income by doing nothing.

Google have started banning affiliate marketers from their AdWords programs and I wonder if this is the beginning of Google realising their index is in danger of disappearing up its own arse in a puff of blue smoke. Just in case Google needs a hand with this here’s my list of things Google can do right now to clean up their index….

1. Discount all links from forums
   They are 99% self promotion and spam. Sure you will kill some links that merit being counted but for the most part you won’t. Bin ‘em.
2. Discount all links from blogs comments
   Again, 99% of blog comment links are self promotion. Most people comment in blogs to generate links. There are some great blog comments out there but it’s for the greater good to simply bin them all.
3. Discount links from Article Sites
   I’ve used article marketing to good effect but the links are not based on merit so although it will hurt me I’m happy to do what’s right for the greater good. In the bin with them.
4. Discount social book marking
   This is a classic example of yet another great idea being abused out of all usefulness. Sorry but in the bin they must go.
5. Discount link farms
   If we, the great unwashed, can find these sites surely you can, so do so and bin them.

So what does that leave? Well heaven forfend we’ll have to revert back to creating something that’s so useful other site owners will want to link to it!

But seriously……. none of the above will happen even though it’s so out of hand that Google’s index is becoming increasingly irrelevant. People are going to become more reliant on old fashioned networking and referrals when looking for products and services, albeit facilitated by 21st century tools (Twitter, Facebook etc). Who knows, maybe Google with it’s new smart phone will move more and more into other areas too as it’s flagship product becomes mired in spam.

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Here’s a simple basic SEO overview and description.

What does Google do?
Google lists websites in response to a users request for information. The request is sometimes simple such as “taxi Aberdeen” and sometimes more complex such as “luxury taxi service in Aberdeen”

How does Google do that?
Google’s software trawls the web indexing pages of information. The software tries to ‘understand’ what a page is about so it can list the page in response to a users search.

How does Google decide which page to put first?
Search results, the list of websites you see when you use Google to find something, are listed in order of relevance and importance. Relevance will depend on the content of the page, importance will depend on links to the page.

Why are links important?
Remember, Google’s search results are automated by software. The software measures the number and quality of links to a page and uses this information to ‘decide’ a pages importance. For example, if 100 pages in the Google index match the search “luxury taxi service in Aberdeen” Google’s software will use the number and quality of links to each page to ‘decide’ which is the best page, which page should be first.

What constitutes a good link?
This is a tough question. There’s plenty of empirical evidence to suggest any link is a good link. However, as a rule of thumb the harder a link is to secure, the more value it will bring to your page.

Can you give me an example?
If you participate in an online forum and add links to your pages from your posts and forum signature these may not provide much benefit as they are not merit based links, they are simply self promotion. If on the other hand you create some very useful content and other people link to it this will often bring more search engine benefit as it’s a merit based link.

Is this always the case?
No, you can enjoy search engine success by using one of the many search engine spamming techniques. The downside to this approach is you run the risk of a sudden fall from the search results if your technique is discovered by Google. Here’s some link building advice detailing  the up and downsides of several link building methods.

Can I simply buy links?
Yes, but Google advises against it.

In Conclusion
Trying to rank your site in Google can be frustrating. When we receive requests for SEO Advice or SEO Reviews we are often told by the site owner that they ‘need to be number one in Google when people type ……………… (insert your keyword here)’. A search result is not a right, if your site is new you will struggle to rank for anything worth ranking for. If your site isn’t well structured the search engines won’t be able to ‘understand’ it. If you don’t have any links Google won’t know if it can trust it.

Work methodically and if you’ve got the budget get some help from an SEO specialist.

But is this the only reason not to buy links, after all Google is missing plenty of paid links and the sites who have bought them are doing very nicely thanks. I suppose it boils down to two things:

1. Will I get caught or am I comfortable doing it?
2. Will  the results last?

Well we don’t do it and it’s because of 1 & 2. With a Pagerank 7 homepage we could do very nicely selling a few links, perhaps I could buy a new car with the proceeds, I certainly would like one. But no, it’s wrong and we don’t do it.

In a world where cheating seems to be almost acceptable from the top of sport to the bottom of politics and everything in between I’d like to think the Internet could become one of the last bastions of meritocracy. Naive though this is it’s what I believe and for that reason I play by the rules.

But what of point 2? Well, I’ve been watching a few sites that rank very well for some heavy duty search phrases and they do this on the back of some really spammy links. One I can think of hasn’t budged for about 2 years! They probably wouldn’t care if they lost their rank now, they’ve made their money anyway.

But if your business is around for the duration I’d advise building it on bedrock not sand. It’s just a hunch, I may well be wrong, I may well be a naive dreamer.

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Reciprocal links are not always bad. If a site selling diving holidays links to a site selling wetsuits and the wetsuit site links back that’s normal linking. Where reciprocal links look spammy is where a site about bird watching links to a site selling birthday cakes. Relevance is the byword with reciprocal links.

Now the thorny question of ‘what is a good quality link?‘

Your dream link would be an article on this page about how quality curtain poles add so much to the feel of a room, where the words ‘curtain poles’ link to your homepage. That’s a pagerank 5 page, that means it’s trusted, and the value of that page linking to your page could be significant.

Your complete waste of time link would be being one of the footer links on this page, pure spam. Of course the BBC are not likely to offer you a link from that page whereas that spam page would no doubt sell you a link for thirty bob.

In the end it’s the quality of your content that dictates the quality of the links you attract. Eric Ward sums it up perfectly in this link building article.

In a nutshell to attract a great link you need something worth linking to on your site. Something that adds value to the page where the link is coming from. This takes us full circle back to quality content because there’s no point wasting time asking people with quality sites to link to your site unless your site is offering something unique. This is why people resort to buying links, it’s quicker and takes less work so long as you have the budget.

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A link building question caught my eye so I clicked in and was quite amused to see someone state that “some SEO companies are charging £20 for one link!” as if that was daylight robbery.

If you are going down the spam route (forum spam, link farms or worse) then £20 might be high, after all it only takes a few seconds to type something like:

“Great post it make sense to me. Buy cheap shite here…..”

However, the value of this kind of nonsense is on the wane in my opinion and will continue to be less and less effective as Google piles on the pressure to kill sites using link spam in its ongoing bid to clean up its index.

So what does it really take to establish a worthwhile link?

1. Exceptional content on your site.
2. A website owner who sees the value in your content

If you’ve got number one and you can find number 2 you are in a very good place. If you haven’t got number 1 then keep shelling out the twenties because no owner of a quality website is ever going to link to your website if it’s third rate.

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However, the scramble for links means that anything that resembles a linking opportunity is being used and abused, down grading the resource in the process.

Take our seed keywords engine for example. It’s a simple system for looking for keywords. Increasingly we are seeing link spam being entered into the system even though no part of the system creates links to people’s websites.

Google is supposedly working hard to discount spammy links, it’s slow job because of the volume of crap out there but my view is they will get there. This means link building effort would be better spent on looking for and securing quality links from quality sites that add value to your content and the users experience.

If a link is out of context it’s probably, ultimately, not going to do you any good.

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Ben McKay makes some interesting points in his post about SEO as branding. He talks about latent semantics and how websites should be themed in order to give clear messages to search engines.

As I said in my post about SEO as a quality control measure, SEO is in many respects simply that, quality control for websites. If your website is structured so search engines can spider and index it you dramatically improve your site’s chances of being ranked.

As Ben said, SEO is about making lots of incremental changes to your website. For example are you looking at the bounce rates of individual pages? It can be sobering to see your page ranking on page one for the phrase you were chasing and bringing in traffic only for most of the traffic to bounce.

First a little history. Sergey and Larry were PhD students when they created Google as documented in their paper The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine. Incidentally this paper was presented at WWW7 in Brisbane, Australia in 1998, the same conference where I presented this.

Their paper states;

“Academic citation literature has been applied to the web, largely by counting citations or backlinks to a given page. This gives some approximation of a page’s importance or quality. PageRank extends this idea by not counting links from all pages equally, and by normalizing by the number of links on a page.”

In essence a page is ranked based in the number and quality of links it has. In an academic environment where papers are peer reviewed this system, for the most part, works well. However in an open market does this still hold true? Probably not.

Increasingly when I talk to people they decry the results thrown up by Google suggesting few of the results for a given search match their needs. Furthermore there is also an issue of the general population assuming a number 1 position for a search result is held by the ‘best’ page as quality is pretty much implied by being top of Google. This is also flawed.

I haven’t got the answer but it’s clear in search land that the cream is not always floating to the top. Google and the other search engines have a mind bogglingly complex task to improve their search results but I’m sure they do recognise they have to.

This is all well and good but how does this impact on simple website owners such as you and me? In essence I’d suggest you stop link spamming and concentrate on improving the quality of your user experience and content.

Ultimately, you would expect, the cream will rise to the top. If it doesn’t Google is doomed because people will stop using it, dismissing its results as irrelevent, something many people already do!

I’ve got every faith in Google and I’d lay good odds that those who work hard on their sites will win the day and the link junkies will fade away.