slimster.net

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.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 25th, 2007 at 8:10 pm and is filed under Corporate America, Linking, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.