Link buying has been around about as long as webmasters have been creating and monetizing websites, whether through paid banner links or text link ads. So why on Earth would I even consider that there’s a chance of something so long-standing being a marketing fad? Well recently, Google asked people to help them crack down on identifying paid links, so that they can devalue them when determining a site’s pagerank. Many in the webmaster community are up in arms about it. So was link buying just a long-running fad in the making, or will we continue to buy and sell links well into the future?

How it Works:

Website and business owners purchase links (often text links with anchor text being a specific keyword phrase they want to rank well for in search engines). The idea is to purchase those links not only for specific keywords, but also on sites related to those keywords with a decent Google PR, in order to pass some of that PR value along to them. The results are designed to lead to a higher PR for the buyer on the link’s landing page, and better rankings in the SERPs for the landing page for the targeted keyword phrase.

Now Google wants to devalue paid links. Since it’s technically impossible to differentiate between paid and non-paid links in the majority of cases, Google is asking people to report any paid links to them. There are quite a few worries and complaints in webmaster world… a) that competitors will report their links has paid to hurt them, even if they’re not, b) that Google’s just a search engine and really has no right to try to control how people advertise their sites, c) that the problem is in Google’s algorithm or Pagerank system in the first place and not in link buying, and d) that Google’s being hypocritial and dictatorial for a company that makes most of its own money through link buying.

Fad or Fab?

FAB - Here’s Why -  First of all, even if Google could devalue every paid link (they can’t and never will be able to), you’d have to be a Google slave to really be too heavily affected by that move, and frankly if that’s the case, you need to rethink your business model to begin with. With the rise of online advertising in general, from PPC to PPP, link buying is going nowhere soon, and it shouldn’t! Here’s why link buying will continue to have value:

1. Buying links directly gives the advertiser more control over placement than ad networks like Adsense and YPN. Advertisers can directly target their market even if keywords on a site don’t match those of their ads, and they can control more effectively when those ads will display.
2. Frankly people are making too much money off of link selling to simply sit back and let Google try to stop them. If anything, Google’s latest attept at controlling online advertising is going to come back and bite them in the ass, because, as their so good at doing, the webmaster community will simply find a way to work around it, creating even sneakier buyer-seller relationships and natural-looking links. Of course, Google would love for every site owner to openly disclose any paid links. On an ethical level I agree with that… just not if it means being punished by the likes of a simple search engine that may be getting too big for its britches.
3. Link buying wasn’t always about increasing Google PR and search rankings. Remember the good old days before PR even existed? Buying links was a means of gaining exposure (like I mentioned earlier, with a specific target market). Even if Google devalues them, they can’t take away that original value. No matter how you cut it, a referral (paid or not) from certain sites will still bring a lot of direct traffic and increase a site’s name recognition and branding efforts.

Overall, webmasters and advertisers have no intention of being “ruled over” by anyone. No matter how many obstacles are thrown down, they’ll find a way to circumvent them… and now with other companies making a pretty penny off of services like these (like text-link-ads, pay-per-post, and reviewme), you’d better believe the Web world won’t just sit back and take it. So keep buying links. Just be smart about it, and understand all of the different levels of value every link can bring you.

Categories: Advertising / Marketing / PR
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