Don't Buy Paid Links for SEO

It really couldn't be any clearer and it really has been clear for a long time...LOL. Don't buy paid links for the purpose of ranking highly in Google. And for that matter, don't sell links either. I really don't get why this is such a big surprise for most Webmasters. It's pretty clear that ever since Page Rank has become the most powerful force in the SEO universe (and by that I mean the emergence of Google so please don't start the "is Page Rank important?" debate, we will save that for a later time) that a link has been equivalent to a vote in the Google system. It doesn't take a genius to understand why Google doesn't want the people with the most money or the people who can best reverse engineer their search results to be able to manipulate their index. If Google wants their search results to be a true reflection of what people think is the best resource for a particular topic, then it makes perfect sense for them to not want to include paid links into that ranking equation. And the article above certainly illustrates that they have been clear about that for a long time. So now that their systems are doing a better job of enforcing those principles, why are so many people upset? Well obviously because the old tricks that used to work don't work anymore..lol. I am truly sympathetic to anyone that unjustly suffers because of the unintended side effects which might be occurring because of Google's new filters. Anytime Google penalizes a group of sites, there are bound to be a couple inadvertent problems. With an index that big, how could there not be. But for the most part, there are a lot of people who are upset because they can't buy their way to listings anymore and now they have to get more creative with the way they present their content, market their site and promote viral linking. Anyway, I think it is obvious how I feel about the subject which is why none of my clients ever buy links for the purpose of SEO results.

One of the things I think is very interesting is the number of comments where Webmasters blame the stricter stance of Google towards paid links for a number of issues that have nothing to do with what's actually happening. Take for example the post in which the Webmaster from Joetech.com says "This STILL doesn't explain why JoeTech.com dropped from PR5 to PR0 over night. I didn't sell any paid links and nobody ever told me what I did wrong." Matt Cutts later goes on to explain "lottobymatch, bear in mind that Google also did a full PageRank update a few weeks ago, and PageRanks can fluctuate naturally as a result of that as well. For example, joetech.com doesn't have any sort of webspam penalty in Google. We do occasionally see PageRank variations for sites because of canonicalization issues. You might check this post for advice, for example: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/09/setting-preferred-domain.html". This is a common pattern, unfortunately, for many Webmasters who are quick to jump to conclusions about behavior patterns with search. A quick look at Joetech.com's analytics should have told that person that there was no penalty because traffic wasn't affected. If his site had really gone from a 5 to a 0, the loss of page rank would have been a secondary concern to the loss of traffic and revenue that certainly would have followed a penalty. It's important when you're trying to figure out why something has changed in SEO, not to jump to conclusions. And ESPECIALLY don't go changing a bunch of stuff until you are sure (or at least have a reasonable hypothesis) as to what the problem is.

Maybe next time we'll have that Page Rank conversation.