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Where Are All The Paid Links Going?

Posted by Michael Martinez on April 20, 2007 in Web spam

Search engine optimization has sort of peaked and has been in gradual decline for the past several years. As more and more so-called SEOs focus on link-building, true search engine optimization falls into disrepute and becomes a smaller part of the picture.

From a search user’s perspective, the vanishing art of search engine optimization is a good thing in that at least when the paid links join the spammy bot-dropped blog and forum links in Google’s Supplemental Results Index the stuff that remains will be mostly natural.

If we assume for the sake of discussion that Google does manage to filter out a significant portion of paid links later this year, it will be the first time in Google’s history that link-based manipulation of their search results has been thwarted.

Not that I expect Google to enjoy the victory for long as some old-school spammers developed link-building techniques which still work today and that won’t even come close to tripping Google’s new filters. The SEO industry’s love affair with links won’t end by any means, regardless of what happens.

Link baiting, of course, is all the rage in some circles now and as long as the search engines encourage Web marketers to game other services link baiting may continue to gain credibility. But DIGG and other services have already begun to defend against the forces of manipulation, and I expect those battles to continue across the years.

However, if you look at the bigger picture, a lot of relatively innocent people have already been hurt by Google’s enthusiastic devotion to Supplementalization. Many more — perhaps less innocent — people are (supposedly) about to find their precious paid links relegated to the Supplemental Index.

Technically, if my estimates of how many pages have gone Supplemental are anywhere near accurate, a significant portion of paid links have already gone Supplemental. But all Google did with last year’s algorithmic updates was separate the wheat from the chaff. Those people who know how to cherry-pick the paid links are reaping a windfall harvest of manipulation success.

And that is the problem for Google: they made the bad guys (in their eyes) stronger, rather than weakening them. Of course, Google’s pain will hurt the other search engines too because as more highly trusted sites smell the money being waved at them for their linking power, more paid links will appear across all the search engine results.

If you find the right links, your new domain will appear in AOL (through Google), Ask, Google, Live, and Yahoo! in less than a month and rank competitively for commercial queries. So instead of Google’s ill-advised policies hurting only their own quality, they are now slamming their peers as well.

And the reason why this acceleration in search manipulation is occuring is summed up in a well-known aphorism: that which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. The Centers for Disease Control have now eliminated all but one class of antibiotics from standard gonorrhea treatment. Why? Because active strains of the disease have been developing immunity to the older drugs.

Spammers, like bacteria, develop immunity to anti-spam technologies. We have seen this cycle unfold repeatedly through all the years that spam has afflicted email, news groups, and search engines. Every new anti-spam strategy deployed to rein in the problem has only driven spammers to develop newer, more efficient ways of ignoring the rules.

Spammers only care about one thing: making money. And Google has not only made it easier for spammers to make money, they’ve provided considerable incentive for search spammers to make money.

Matt Cutts may be a nice guy working for one of the wealthiest companies on Earth, but he is outgunned, outmanned, and being outmaneuvered even as I write this. The search spammers are already testing the next generation of software, techniques, and fallback plans. Paid links are so yesterday, even though they remain so crucial to many people’s basic Web visibility campaigns.

One possible outcome — should Google’s latest incentive prove to be successful — is that Web advertising may actually increase. If you think your browsing experience sucks every time a popup or floater ad obscures your view of mediocre text that found its way to the top of Google’s search results, wait until all those people who cannot rank in organic search or PPC start throwing more dollars at those high profile sites.

What else are you going to do, but buy your way to visibility through whatever forms of advertising promise some hope of branding your URL into searchers minds? I’ve been saying for years that if you cannot rank for a competitive query, then tell people to search for something where you do rank well. That strategy will now become more economically feasible for many sites.

I’m not sure how many more ads the news sites can squeeze into their slow-loading, badly designed pages, but now that Google is going to re-integrate news articles into Web search, there will be even more incentive for the news sites to monetize their Web copy. The news can wait: there are billions of dollars to be made, and those billions of dollars will pay for “editorially chosen links” in any form that advertisers can find them.

Google will continue to allow unfiltered links to pass anchor text, of course, but that will only make the problem worse. People want what they cannot have. I have already been approached by people wanting to buy links on Xenite.Org. I don’t sell links, I won’t sell links, but I have to admit that the temptation is dangling in front of my nose. I may be the last guy on the Web to take money for a (non-Javascript) link, but that won’t stop people from trying to corrupt me.

But people like me will also continue to find ways to manipulate Google’s search results regardless of what they do about paid links, exchanged links, dropped links, etc. The Google algorithm is the best documented search ranking algorithm on the Web. There are so many holes in it you could manipulate it with your eyes closed.

Over the next six months you’ll see more and more SEO blogs recapping the fundamental techniques of on-page manipulation. Such revivals in traditional optimization are usually short-lived, because it will take no more than six months to a year for someone to formulalize the next big link manipulation technique.

But remember that social media spam is now very much a reality and eventually the backlash against it will make link baiting less economical — at least, link baiting as some people practice it. Truly good content, once it achieves some sort of visibility, does honestly earn support. But most link baiting Web sites are just not that good.

That’s why there are gangs of social media spammers, and their networks are only just now in their infancy. In another year or two those networks will be very sophisticated spamming communities.

DIGG, Technorati, Newsvine, you can all thank Google for your listing on the Roster of Spam Victim Communities. Pray that your resources don’t become the next battleground for paid link spam. You’ve only seen the first generation of what promises to be a multi-generational experience of manipulation.