Online Marketing Today

BREAKING NEWS:

Link Building Misconception 5: Buying Text Link Advertising Will Get Your Website Penalized Or Banned…

I have not once seen a website banned because they purchased text link advertising.

What I have seen however is a very public display of “dissatisfaction” by Google applying an “apparent penalty” to a very major company’s network of websites back in 2006.

That network was not buying links, but rather selling them and pretty publicly too I might add.

It was well known in the SEO community that these were the “golden links” to obtain if you could afford them (primarily in relation to having high Page Rank values more than anything else).

When I say an “apparent penalty” what Google did was to manually reduce the PR values of the individual network’s websites dropping many from PR8 valued home pages down to PR4 valued home pages.

And make it known they did it.

However, those websites continued to maintain most of their actual search engine rankings. This tactic was to simply scaremonger the webmaster community into believing the sky was going to fall should they consider selling text link advertising – and as a flip side buying text links was considered bad by association.

It worked and really shook up the text link advertising industry moving it largely out of the public arena. That is webmasters stopped actively letting people know they could purchase text link advertising on their websites – publicly anyway…

…more often than not the opportunity still presents itself in one fashion or another when advertising rate cards are requested from most websites.

You see the trouble with paid text link advertising is that above and beyond the other techniques available to us as webmasters, ultimately those with the biggest budgets will see the biggest impact. If they want to rank well, and they have the money, then ultimately no keyword phrase becomes unrealistic.

The end result for Google (and ultimately Google’s users) is that it commercializes the search engine results to a degree – and Google isn’t going let you do that unless you give them a cut.

It means that a commercial website with little “quality information” above and beyond selling their own products and services could easily out rank a purely educational website that might be of more perceived value to the search engine user.

The interesting thing about this myth is that it’s primarily propagated by those webmasters who become jealous of those that have the ability to purchase text link advertising when they themselves might not have the means to do so (or choose not to out of the fear that this myth creates or for whatever other reason).

The truth is it happens.

It’s happening right now.

It will continue to happen in the future.

However as I’ve said before…

I have not once seen a website banned because they purchased text link advertising.

The truth of the matter is that unless you put a public notice on the home page of your website saying “I’m buying links to promote my website in the search engines”, the search engines have no way of identifying whether or not your incoming links (or a proportion of them) are paid for.

They have no way of knowing whether any transaction has occurred between you and a webmaster that’s now linking to you – be it an exchange of money or services or anything else – or they just decided to link to you because they liked your website.

You might here rumors in the discussion forums that they can easily identify paid links using computer algorithms.

That they can look for keywords on websites that would clearly relate to this practice; terms such as “sponsored links”, “paid links”etc. They can then penalize the links listed under those areas within a website.

Sure this is possible programming wise.

But… and this is a very BIG BUT… you need to realize that even extremely minor adjustments in Google’s algorithm mean MAJOR resource additions to compute (when means massive increases in company expenditure) making this very improbable.

It’s no minor thing adding that additional functionality.

Google would have to now also continually check every page, of every website, on the entire internet for compliance – and how many false positives would it return? And how many websites that aren’t paying for link advertising would be impacted without warrant?

We then come back to a previous link building misconception…

That is you cannot negatively manipulate someone else’s search engine rankings by throwing incoming links (bad, paid or otherwise) at their websites.

There would be nothing to stop a competitor with deep pockets purchasing text links to point to their competitor’s website/s and push such a penalty on them.

It just doesn’t happen and I guarantee you would’ve heard about this happening in the media if it were a possibility and actually existed at the moment. It’s dog eat dog out there search engine optimization wise – especially in the adult, casino, and pharmacy industries where business morals more often than not take second place to the bottom line.

Of course, whether or not you choose to utilize paid text link advertising as part of your own well rounded link building campaign is entirely up to you. The only reason I make this post is because you shouldn’t believe everything you read – particularly when there’s just so much crap out there about link building in general.

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