slimster.net

In my first blog post back in February of 2006, I talked about (really, rambled quite a bit about) white hat and black hat SEO techniques and I said,

People often fall into the trap of judging “black hat” and “white hat” techniques and, if one believes Google is God, then that judgement certainly has some relevance.

Oh, the blind followers, how they love to point their fingers!

A few years ago, at one of those gatherings of SEM professionals, representatives from all the major engines were asked how they felt about Pay Per Post services. I remember the same question being asked three months later in NYC and the answers were essentially the same. Rand Fishkin has a great post called, “Search Engines say OK to Pay Per Post services” where he summarizes the conversation. Here’s a snippet from his post,

Tim Converse answered first and said that Yahoo! wouldn’t try to pick one post out of twenty or fifty on every blog that might be running advertorials or paid reviews just to stop link value from that particular post. If the engine looked at the site and saw that in general, the outgoing links were of high quality, there would be no discount of link value for paid blog material. Adam from Google agreed, but said little in particular.

That’s right, Google had no problem with Pay Per Post in late 2006 and early 2007. At least the representative at SES didn’t have any stated objections when asked directly. But that wasn’t from Matt Cutts. Matt later responded to Rand’s blog and declared that Google really wanted to “detect paid links” and that would cause offending sites to have a loss of Google trust, i.e., ranking.

Obviously, things quickly change and are not always black and white. Now, Google is asking people to report the buying and selling of links, including Pay Per Posts, so they can filter organic rankings of the evil doers, er, marketers. Like Adwords, Pay Per Post is typically used as a marketing technique so companies can increase their online exposure.

There are 3 Adwords reps for every Starbucks store and it would be easy enough for them to communicate to their clients as most traditional marketers don’t read SEO blogs. That way, the Marketing department could hear from the horse’s mouth that some marketing and branding efforts (i.e., Pay Per Post) could now have a negative effect on the efforts of the SEO Department. But that’s not how Google information flows. One might be led to believe that Google actually likes it when companies spend more money on Adwords to make up for lost organic traffic.

Sound like a “grassy knoll conspiracy”? Maybe. But I’ve seen companies take worse actions for the sake of the shareholders. Some might even believe that Google is standing up for the small guy as a result of their flip-flopping, but I would argue that they’re creating a bigger demand for Adwords.

Pop up ads – now that’s a Marketing favorite that really does warrant punishment. And I begged Matt Cutts to consider pop up punishment back in 2003. He didn’t give. But as far as tv, radio, email, print and the array of other marketing and advertising methods go, Marketing teams work very hard and spend a lot of time, effort and energy on brand awareness. If they choose to experiment with a new marketing method, they should be able to do so without considering the fickle nature of Google’s evolving algorithm. And they certainly shouldn’t be judged and accused like they’re committing a sin if they don’t read Matt Cutt’s blog.

Stealing, coveting, bearing false witness – now those are real world sins, not pay per post.

When I saw the quirky video from SES this week, I thought it was a clever link bait idea for viral marketing. Matt Cutts even liked it and gave it his golden blessing. But since it’s bound to create a lot of link juice for that guy, I didn’t applaud too loudly. Instead, I briefly had black hat envy thoughts and dreamed about hiring a big gun like Greg Boser to counter the pending link surge with a big bang of links. Personally, I couldn’t black hat myself out of a paper bag. And I can’t hire Greg either (sorry Greg, but you do rock – please disregard all of those emails, voice mails, faxes and that candy gram), as much as the Dr. Evil in me might entertain the idea. It is impressive that someone pulled off a stunt like that and it’s a trick that is gaining popularity. But the success of my site in the same space comes from the clean, hard work of some really good people and lots of great content. And that’s the way it will continue to thrive. I’m personally more concerned with making a quality product than finding ways to game the system.

As to what Google does and does not approve of, I think the whole paid link debate is off course. A few years ago, I stood up at SES and asked the Google panelist why Yahoo was not considered a “paid link”. The answer was that Yahoo! conducts a “human review” and that payment is for that human evaluation, not the link itself. Well, that’s a bunch of crap. Yahoo conducts a credit card review and that’s about it. I think it was Rand Fishkin who said, “paid links, you can’t live with them and you won’t rank without them”, or something like that.

Just for the record, blind blog posts, scripted social media tagging, link farms and other such anonymous, unqualified link herding is not something that represents quality content and relevance. In addition, contrary to Google’s public opinion, link bait is equally non-relevant and blindly skews the search engine algorithms. As a matter of fact, link baiting is only one degree away from Phishing. If the bait is relevant to the actual theme of the website, like the funny shave everywhere video, then it makes sense. When it’s out of the neighborhood, and gathers link juice to an unrelated topic, it dilutes relevance. It’s an accepted loophole and a growing commodity. And if Google did actually change their mind about it, there is nothing they could do to stop it.

The fact is, standard business directories such as the Yellow Pages cost money. Yahoo directory costs money. And most organizations consider time spent to modify a site (add a link) as an expense. Paid links are not going away. But what really rattles me is that Google invented most of these problems and they keep contradicting themselves. For years, Google said not to write web pages with search engines in mind. Now, Google wants “no follow” tags put on links such as blog links – a request specifically for the search engines. Frankly, that’s an extra step that corporate heads, programmers and marketers won’t even consider as it has nothing to do with increasing the quality of a product. Why should we do more work just so Google’s flawed algorithm won’t make a relevance mistake?

Here’s my point. I think it’s creative that someone can make a silly video and get links based on making people laugh. Creative, but not relevant to the topic of the website for which relevance score will increase. Google always harps about ranking sites based on “relevance”. Well, that’s clearly not true. If someone can make people laugh and thereby get links to increase their search engine rank for ‘digital cameras’, that does not make the site more relevant for ‘digital cameras’. That simply gets the site more inbound links. And that is interpreted by Google as ‘relevant’. That’s like giving good grades to the class clown because he makes noise and makes people laugh.

Is it marketing or is it trickery? It can be both. Great marketing gets a brand in front of people and has a variety of formats. That’s perfectly fine. But bait and switch types of link manipulation influence search engines for the malevolent and benevolent alike. If Google thinks the effect is benign, and they seem to, we will continue to see an onslaught of organizations rooted in black hat Social Media manipulation continue to saturate the SERPs with irrelevance.

Inbound links, regardless of intent, do influence search engines. And as long as there is a positive return, they will remain a commodity. Equally, link bait will continue to thrive, will continue to grow as a commodity and will continue to degrade relevance in SERPs. In the end, being relevant is about being organized, architecturally sound, persistent, having authoritative content, helping people achieve their goals, as well as being clever and getting quality inbound links. The game is getting more complex and, as the SES video has proven, anyone can have success at manipulating Google’s algorithm if they expose the right loophole.