Are Newspapers Planning to Sell Links for Search Manipulation?

I attended and presented at the BrightonSEO mini conference organised for SEOs last Friday, which was a great day of exchanging knowledge amongst local SEOs from the nearby communities and was a great afternoon full of fun and learning.

There were 8 presentations from web designers and SEOs which were all entertaining, but a 9th session, that I don’t think was widely expected at the end of the day, caused a lot of debate amongst those present in the room.

A gentleman called Paul (I didn’t catch his surname) stood up in front of the assembled throng and launched into an impassioned sales pitch. By all accounts, there has been an NDA floating around in the SEO community with regards to this pitch, so some folks were aware of what was being proposed, though for a large percentage of the audience (myself included) it was the first we had heard of it.

Paul introduced himself as a “blackhat” SEO, someone that had in the past control of millions of links that he used to rank sites in the top 3 positions for highly monetised phrases, in sectors like finance, and had a view that a website was disposable, and if you gain a top ranking and earn money for a few days that you hold that position that it is better than being perpetually “stuck” at number 8.

By all accounts if you take everything that he said at face value, it proved to be an effective tactic, although he was not concerned if a website “crashed and burned” as he had another site ready to replace it, which again could be manipulated into top positions through his link network.

All quite interesting stuff, although the clients I work with are ones that want to establish a long term brand success strategy, and his explanation of how he approached things just re-affirmed my thoughts that the tactics employed in a long term strategy are much more suitable for the type of business I work with as standard.

Paul then moved on to talking about the “struggling” Newspaper industry, about journalists losing jobs all over the place because of the boom of free low quality content being seeded around the web (and a lot of it coming from SEOs) and losing revenue with advertising to Google. By all accounts, they felt that is was about time for the Newspapers to fight back and start reclaiming their previous position.

Paul discussed an overview of the link building – by all accounts its a $3 billion dollar industry, and the newspapers felt that they could get a good cut of this finance.

So – onto the plan. Apparently a very large network of hundreds, if not thousands of local and national newspaper websites across the US and UK have apparently signed up to begin selling of links. The plan is for them to identify pages that have little to no traffic, and sell links in context on these pages in large quantities to manipulate Google’s search engine rankings in the favour of those sites that are linked to as a result.

Basically, it struck me, that this organisation was talking about creating a new generation of link farm – a tactic that a few years ago proved to be successful for many websites, but has dwindled in it’s authority passing in recent years. Newspaper links are well thought of by Google and other search engines – journalists have standards that have to be adhered to for journalistic integrity (which I would suggest are not always “exactly” met) and the content is generally considered as “high quality”. These sites also have lots of links pointing to them, which in return means that they have a lot of authority to pass to sites that they link to, meaning that very good, authoritative links can be gained as a result.

However, once this type of practice is out in the open, surely it’s over? If such a widespread abuse of Google’s system by such “authorities” in the web landscape in terms of the link juice they pass on is not stopped by them, then it would become something that everyone in a competitive area would have to do to ensure balance. However, the easiest way out for Google with this if it does come to pass is to just stop those sites being able to pass “link juice” on to the sites that they link to. The only losers in this instance are the early adopters of those links, who will have paid money to not gain any benefit, although that is the risk that you take when purchasing links.

Whilst the practice of abusing Google’s algorithm is not “illegal” – you don’t break any laws after all, it is however against Google’s quality guidelines to purchase links for the purpose of manipulating rankings. My perception of “purchasing” a link has always been to do with intent. If a link is being bought for the traffic that it is likely to deliver, then Google probably wont penalise you (after all, is that any different really to AdSense or AdWords?).

If you are buying links to boost your Google rankings, then you are running a risk – because Google can at any time decide to not pass the authority that those links have. If you pay a monthly retainer on that link, then you are effectively throwing that money away from that point (and you don’t always know when it is).

I’ve helped clients purchase links for traffic purposes – for example, the Yahoo Directory, which is decent for SEO, as well as having the potential, still, to be driving traffic to a website, although I have seen this decrease over the last year for some of my sites that traditionally got a fair amount of traffic from it. But my general advice for purchasing links, has been to not do so, mainly because the vast majority of paid links are incredibly easy to spot.

Not so long ago, we had a group of Newspapers approaching us offering to sell us some links on their site, and providing examples of sites that already were using this service. I think that they should have been cleverer about marketing this link selling, as none of the sites they provided as examples ranked for any of the terms that links had been purchased for, which led me to believe that these quite expensive links weren’t providing sufficient benefit to engage with.

The biggest frustration about the link buying system is that it does prove effective in the short to medium term – and much more than Google would like webmasters to believe, for obvious reasons. Google need to become better at detecting this manipulation of their algorithm to prevent people from wanting to continue to use it and I am sure that this is something that they are constantly wanting to improve at!

UPDATE: It’s clear from feedback that I have had on this blog that some of the details of what I recalled were not quite correct, or were perhaps misinterpreted – this was written from memory, as I had stopped writing notes from that point. Paul’s speech was much more heavily  targeted to saving the jobs and content production of journalists by enabling them to produce content for the “new world” so to speak, and I think it’s only fair to the presenter that I clarify that – as that was the largest thrust of this speech.

Related Posts

1. More Newspapers Selling Links
2. Google and Newspapers Battle it out for Revenues
3. How do Google spot paid links?
4. How do broken links affect SEO?
5. Ethical Search Engine Optimisation – Different Meanings?
6. Google Increases Search Share in UK to 87%
7. Who do you link to – time to check your outbound links
8. Search Sponsored Links – How to review competing Google Adwords ads (PPC)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 at 9:47 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.