SEO Blog

Last week Google was caught buying links, albeit in a slightly round about kind of fashion. One of the agencies that they had hired to promote Chrome rather foolishly attached some blatant followed links in a number of video adverts as well as a fair few blog posts. It was a bit of an embarrassing own goal for the search engine and one that has since forced them to enforce a manual penalty on their own site.

It’s a strange situation and one that only came to the world’s attention thanks to some sleuthing from Aaron Wall. How is it that a company which effectively polices the content online and ranks everything according to strict guidelines has been found breaking its own rules?
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There’s always been a bit of controversy surrounding the ability to shop a competitor to Google if you find that they’re breaking the rules. Some suggest that this is unfair, particularly if you don’t at least contact the perpetrator first, others believe that site owners should pay the consequences of their actions – particularly if they’re unduly benefitting from their activities.

So what is the answer? If you’ve seen that another site has bought links, should you keep quiet or say something to the authorities?
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Many people still swear by the power of paid links. There’s no doubting that many are very difficult to trace and therefore can’t be penalised. However, as a promoter of ethical SEO and a believer in long-term strategies (rather than short-term gains), it’s impossible to condone it as a practice for client sites.

The reasoning for these reservations is is simple enough – it contravenes Google’s rules. If you decide to go up against the most powerful search engine, then there’s a good chance you’ll get burnt. Of course you can pull the wool over its eyes, but eventually you may be found out and when you do it could be disastrous. However, does that mean that you should just get rid of them all and start again?

Let’s take an example we see time and time again. A client has a site full of paid links and has seen a slight drop for one term but others remain strong, what do you do?
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If you’ve been messing around with a few black hat optimisation techniques, knowingly or otherwise, it’s likely that Google will catch up with you one day. When they do, it’s safe to assume the worst.

They aren’t the most forgiving search engine. If you’ve been found to be contravening their rules, then they are likely to come down on your like a tonne of bricks. This won’t necessarily mean being thrown out of the index entirely, but your rankings could suffer to the extent where you might as well have been.

This isn’t the end of the road, but it’s certainly a major issue. It won’t be resolved in a day either, it can take weeks, or even months to get back to any kind of visibility. Your reputation with Google will have been tarnished, but not necessarily irrevocably so.
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As I’ve mentioned in the past, Google generally have a soft spot for the big brands in their listings. Whether it is for product searches or terms related to the businesses themselves, more often than not a corporate big hitter will be at the top.

Now we can’t discredit SEO work entirely on these sites. If they’re a multi-national corporation then there’s a fair chance that they’ve got the marketing budget to employ a pretty decent team of search engine optimisation services. But what happens if they start buying up paid links, are involved in huge link farms, what then?
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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.
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Plenty of people have tried, but almost all have failed to get around Google’s pretty strict rules. All search engines hate to be made to look stupid, they dislike even the notion of another individual profiting from breaking their rules. Therefore they work doubly hard to detect such issues and are inclined to punish suitably.

So how might you consider gaming the system?

How about getting a few sites ranking for the same phrase? Clever in principle, horribly transparent in reality.
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