The Real Cost of Paid Links
You’re probably tired about reading how evil paid links are by now. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that they continue to work; however, criticisms against them rarely come with any explicit examples of the negative impact they can have.
Well, how about this one? Econsultancy yesterday highlighted the case of gourmetgiftbaskets.com, who offer exactly what their name suggests [see: The $4m Google penalty]. They were making huge profits and sitting comfortably in the top couple of places on Google for all of their primary terms. Unfortunately though one day all the rankings disappeared. No word of warning, no apparent reason why, the site just wasn’t visible any more.
The culprit? Paid links of course.
The site owner Ryan Abood had outsourced his SEO requirements to a couple of firms who happily went about building his online profile. Unfortunately one of these was using paid links to bolster his profile. As soon as Google found out, it pulled the plug.
No longer in top spot, not even in the top 1,000 results, gourmetgiftbaskets.com had paid the ultimate penalty for their optimisation shenanigans. There’s no immediate right of appeal, just a massive black hole in site traffic.
The article suggests that the drop in rankings cost the company $4 million. By anybody’s standards that’s a pretty hefty hit. This was not only contributed to by the drop in natural rankings but also a hike in the amount spent on PPC to counteract the drop. A handy fallback if you do have such problems.
Whilst Mr. Abood talks about the site’s subsequent successes justifying this rankings drop, there’s little acknowledgement of the problems that got it in trouble in the first place. The site was breaking the rules. It had an unnaturally inflated Google ranking caused by what we can only assume were a number of paid links.
But you don’t have to be a massive site garnering thousands of visits a day to attract unwanted attention from Google. As soon as you step over that line and start tinkering with blackhat techniques, you stand a pretty good chance of getting a severe wrap on the knuckles if found.
Forget thinking about the benefits for a minute and think about what would happen if your site suddenly lost all rankings. Would you be able to survive?
The extra few rankings that the paid links will bring in might contribute a decent number of visitors, but will they be enough to counteract months or even years in the search wilderness? The site used in this case study only properly regained its top rankings during the recent Caffeine update, having dropped off the radar in 2008. That’s almost 2 years without a Google ranking!
The ‘everybody’s doing it’ excuse won’t rub well with Google. They are working hard to eradicate PageRank manipulation and this sits pretty high up there in terms of priorities. If you are caught, you will be punished – just ask Mr. Abood.
