Mar 19 2008
Should I Report Paid Links?
There has been quite a firestorm in the webmastering community as of late regarding paid links. Actually for some time now, there’s been heated debate over the use of them, the SEO benefit and whether or not to engage or restrain from using them. Paying for links benefits a web site in 2 ways. First and foremost, a webmaster that buys a link on a web site with a similar theme or similar content theoretically improves the authority of his own site by nature of the “vote” or vouching that the site owner receives from the other web site. The entire paid link industry was born and has thrived from the well-documented search engine bias and improved search engine rankings resulting from the link juice that passes from one web site to another.
Now, Google in their infinite wisdom and unquenchable pursuit to secure FUD has dubbed them unequivocally evil. So eventually, I drank the Kool-Aid on the advice of Matt Cutts and other industry luminaries regarding paid links. But, of course, only after being toasted a time or two as a result of paid links.
I admittedly made the egregious error of “sponsoring” a WordPress template. Cringe and shudder. The site wide link essentially went on to be a hugely popular template that ended up getting thousands upon thousands of off-topic unrelated links that ultimately vaporized the site in the SERPs, particularly in Google. Double-Doh! All it takes is one miserable mistake like that to get screwed hard. So I paid the price…
Fair enough. I was an idiot. I learned my lesson. And I learned it the hard way.
After getting spanked like a school boy for cutting in the lunch line, I relented and swore off paid links. Never again. Never, ever, ever, ever, ever. I’ll optimize for Yahoo and, eh-hm, Microsoft and hopefully squeeze some life out of those 2 engines while licking my wounds and just rebuilding. Long, painful, regretful sigh…
But recently, while planning the link build for some new sites in the same category I started taking a much deeper look at some of my competitor’s back links. And man did I get pissed. Several of my competitors were ranking in the top 2-15 SERPs on Yahoo, Microsoft AND Google for some highly competitive terms. Now, this particular industry is dominated by a single player but there are some other competitors that have managed to get decent rankings in lieu of the industry’s heavy weight.
Damn them! It took about 2 minutes to figure out that many of their back links had to have been paid for. After further investigation, it became abundantly clear that not ALL of their links were paid for. There were certainly some legitimate links in their profile that were very clearly not paid. But it was clear that they were playing the payola game and benefiting from it SIGNIFICANTLY.
So I got to thinking … should I report this guy’s paid links? After ruminating long and hard about it, I decided not to. And not for the reason that you might think.
To be continued…