Google: Of Paid Links And PageRank
Matt Cutts has some good advice over at his blog on paid links and PageRank, and why the two do not blend.
Where monetized linking is permitted, the basic things to have in mind for any reciprocal or monetized relationship with a web site or contributor are:
The problem, as Google tends to see it, seems to be that maintaining these standards is problematic, when an effort to do so is even put forth. Matt gives an example involving a search for clean and unbiased information on a serious medical issue, then goes on to show how paid links corrupt the results with advertising litter. He sums it all up rather nicely with the following, "If you put your user hat back on, I hope you'll agree that you wouldn't want a serious medical search for brain tumor treatments to be affected by inaccurate or uninformed posts. In fact, if you stumbled across these entries on the web, you might not know whether someone got paid for writing these posts. In the same way that a regular surfer would want disclosure to know if a post were paid, all the major search engines also want to make sure that paid posts are adequately disclosed to search engines as well. Google's documentation for webmasters gives examples of how to do that. I believe the vast majority of our users don't want our organic search results for something as serious as brain tumors to be affected by links in paid posts."
I agree wholeheartedly. There's nothing more irritating for the end-user than to be dragged off course during serious research by advertising copy - not to mention poorly constructed and thinly-veiled advertising copy - or worse, half-formed opinion posing as educated scholarly review.
Keeping your links clean and ethical means not only keeping your PageRank but keeping your readers' trust.
Where monetized linking is permitted, the basic things to have in mind for any reciprocal or monetized relationship with a web site or contributor are:
- Legitimate, honest and ethical
- Professional in their presentation
- Knowledgeable in your industry as well as their own
The problem, as Google tends to see it, seems to be that maintaining these standards is problematic, when an effort to do so is even put forth. Matt gives an example involving a search for clean and unbiased information on a serious medical issue, then goes on to show how paid links corrupt the results with advertising litter. He sums it all up rather nicely with the following, "If you put your user hat back on, I hope you'll agree that you wouldn't want a serious medical search for brain tumor treatments to be affected by inaccurate or uninformed posts. In fact, if you stumbled across these entries on the web, you might not know whether someone got paid for writing these posts. In the same way that a regular surfer would want disclosure to know if a post were paid, all the major search engines also want to make sure that paid posts are adequately disclosed to search engines as well. Google's documentation for webmasters gives examples of how to do that. I believe the vast majority of our users don't want our organic search results for something as serious as brain tumors to be affected by links in paid posts."
I agree wholeheartedly. There's nothing more irritating for the end-user than to be dragged off course during serious research by advertising copy - not to mention poorly constructed and thinly-veiled advertising copy - or worse, half-formed opinion posing as educated scholarly review.
Keeping your links clean and ethical means not only keeping your PageRank but keeping your readers' trust.
Labels: advertising, google, links, matt cutts, pagerank
posted by Daniel Kirk at 12/04/2007 04:52:00 PM
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