In an SES panel yesterday Matt Cutts claims paid links pollute the web ,while he advocates off topic link bait as a useful search marketing strategy. Greg Boser is a bit more honest:
Link Baiting, what Google’s suggest as link building strategy, is as egregious if not worse for relevancy than paid links - viral content of such an off-topic nature should not help your rankings and is more “polluting” than relevant paid links.
Linkbaiting is Expensive, Time Consuming, and Unpredictable The reasons search engineers advocate link baiting are: it is expensive it is time consuming the results are hard to predict it requires social connections it provides off topic low value traffic it typically creates content of limited commercial value (other than the ability to pull in links to rank other pages for stuff they did not have enough relevancy or authority to merit ranking for) the valuable results can take a while to show it often undermines the credibility of the source doing it (by allowing people to think of information from certain sources as link bait, which is a derogatory classification term) many companies have restrictions that prevent them from doing it Because of the above reasons, the technique of link baiting is outside the reach of most webmasters. Since few people can do it, it is highly unpredictable, time consuming, and expensive OF COURSE that is the only way search engineers recommend you build links. They might even like you to believe that almost all links are acquired that way. The more brutally tough it is to build your SEO strategy the more appealing AdWords ads look. Shopping Search? Try AdWords!!! If you can’t buy links to rank, then some irrelevant old sites and marginably relevant articles on authoritative domains (that typically gained their link based authority before Google polluted the link graph with AdSense and NoFollow) gets to clog up the organic search results, and the only way people can find commercially relevant results is if they look at Google’s AdWords ads. May I Lend You a Hand? It gets worse when you think about the uneven policing of the search results, where engineers hand edit small webmaster sites out of the search results (even ones that get free unrequested links from the US Coast Guard and US embassy), and look the other way while large corporations (which have large AdWords budgets) OWN the entire Google search result page for some keywords. The Death of Organic Links A mainstream media magazine did a spread on one of my friend’s websites, where my friend gave them virtually all the content for the article, and they refused to link to my friend’s site in the article because they felt it would be too promotional. Sorry, you already sent out 100,000 magazines with the article in it. You already were too promotional. Sadly, that is just one more example of the death of organic links caused by Google’s fearmongering. Optimize Your Account: Pay Us More I tried Google’s AdWords Campaign Optimizer yesterday. It kept telling me to increase my budget for link buying.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags:
Click,
Links,
paid,
Spam,
They