Paid Links: The Shapeless Underbelly of Optimization

 It’s no secret that paid links are a big part of the SEO game, especially at the top rungs of high volume monetized phrases.  While followed paid links are explicitly against Google’s Best Practices Protocol, the enforcement of such a guideline is tricky, and can be almost impossible to enforce without significant violations of the 4th Amendment.  The issue is that paid links can take on almost any form throughout the web and that focusing on any one of them too much might also damage sites which had garnered similar links legitimately.  Recently, Google made a big statement with three separate crackdowns on Overstock.com, Forbes and Jcpenny.com.  The Overstock.com penalty was the steepest with some industry analysts pointing to ramifications up to a 5% loss in top line sales almost immediately.  While it is always nice to watch huge corporations brought to their knees, it is terrifying to think of a site losing 5% of business over an arbitrary item.

 That said, the paid links which brought down these sites were the result of either the complete ignorance and dutiful negligence of lazy underpaid webmasters or the attempted “Big Middle Finger” to Google.   See in these cases Google typically gives the benefit of the doubt to the webmaster.  They’ll send correspondence letting you know you are in violation of some guideline which will hurt your rankings, and from there play a more sophisticated game of ‘Hot & Cold’ until you find out the problem and correct it enough.  Thus during this process these companies didn’t really care to respond (or know how) to Google’s concerns. And lo, so it came to pass that Google enforced its threats which led to de-ranking of these commercial giants.  More or less though, this particular crackdown had all the markings of being an ‘example’ to send waves through the web that Google is serious and you should stop it and blah blah blah.  The types of links Google found were sponsored links in the right side column.  They were normal advertised links but they weren’t marked “no follow”.  This is the equivalent of begging Google to hurt your rankings, and a pretty quick fix.  My guess is that part of the deal the punished sites made with their advertisers incorporated compensation for the PageRank passed along and thus the Webmaster’s hands were tied by management when they failed to add the no follow tags.

 The rest of the paid link world likely took notice of this event, wrote down the takeaways, and went right back to their business. It’s hard to blame them.  Paid links are rarely laid out in plain view with a series of arrows pointing to them like the overstock.com and Forbes links were.  A paid link, done well, looks like a link that no one would pay for.  It could be something an industry blogger takes on during a slow business week, or perhaps something a link page administrator does for a living.  The point is Google cannot possibly know these things without divulging that they violated your 4th Amendment right to privacy by ruffling through your emails, or worse, eavesdropping on your phone calls.  Since such an action would fly right into the face of the “Don’t Be Evil” mantra of Google, this isn’t something one should worry about.  It does raise a bit of an ethics question.  Since these types of links are so difficult to pinpoint, is it something an SEO should do? If it is all about results, then why not take this risk? If you answered Yes, then you’re not alone.  Paid linking is a huge part of SEO and will continue to be as long as a link’s origins cannot be definitely traced.  White Hats will complain and Black Hats will snicker, but all in all, the first thing you’re told to do in SEO is buy a Yahoo! Directory Link right?