Google & Paid Links

I'm thinking that if Google now remove the PR toolbar then it'll knock the paid links market largely on the head, bringing a lot of serps back to where they should be if they weren't being bought and paid for which isn't supposed to happen but routinely does, and also render the dofollow movement irrelevant at the same time. I hope they do it.

There was the theory, I seem to remember that I associate this theory with something Mike Grehan wrote, that Page Rank was kept alive well past its original sell-by date as to the trained eye manipulation of it shone like a beacon so Google could use it to trap spammers. Let's face it, a lot of high Page Rank pages are that way because they've been obviously spammed so it could be argued that Google retain Page Rank as a spam illumination tool. That said, why the hell don't they discount obvious examples of link spam? I'm fed up with having to explain to clients that the top ten or fifteen places in certain serps are populated exclusively by firms with very big budgets who've openly bought links. It isn't supposed to be this way.

And the whole point of Google is that sites get to the top on merit, not because they've paid for the position. It makes Google useless in many ways, it reduces the no.1 position to that of being simply an indication of who has the biggest budget as opposed to being any indication of quality. That being the case, why would a searcher looking for quality web sites bother with Google? They're cutting their own throats.

I suspect that if people knew what they were eating at MacDonalds they wouldn't go there, and if they realised what they were being served up by Google they wouldn't go there either. People don't realise that when they look at Google results in some cases they're possibly looking at a full screen of paid links. You'd think Google would be getting right on top of this because it threatens their fundamental business model, if people realised that they could simply buy links cheaper (no doubt in some cases) than buying Google's sponsored links and still get to the front page of the SERPS, then that's what they'll do and all that money goes into pockets that aren't Google's. Google loses every which way, from searchers abandoning Google altogether so sponsored links aren't worth so much to Google losing money from businesses not buying sponsored links in the first place because it's cheaper to buy page one-level visibility from other web sites. Quite apart from the personal annoyance this causes me in my SEO efforts, I'm astonished that Google are allowing this to go on. Perhaps all those PHDs are on summer break... :-)

BB 13/09/07