Selling text links on your blog is against Google’s quality guidelines
Some bloggers swear that the easiest way to make money is by independently selling advertising space on your blog, be it in the form of banners or text links. To me, this sounded like a great idea. I had visions of building this blog up, hitting a decent page rank, and then having the power to be able to sell links and banners and make some real money online.
Then I was pointed in the direction of this on Google Webmaster Tools:
We work hard to return the most relevant results for every search we conduct. To that end, we encourage site managers to make their content straightforward and easily understood by users and search engines alike. Unfortunately, not all websites have users’ best interests at heart. Some site owners attempt to “buy PageRank™” in the form of paid links to their sites. Buying links to improve PageRank violates our quality guidelines.
Google uses a number of methods to detect paid links, including algorithmic techniques. We also welcome information from our users. If you know of a site that buys or sells links, please tell us by filling out the fields below. We’ll investigate your submissions, and we’ll use your data to improve our algorithmic detection of paid links.
Where did this come from? If paid links are against Google’s quality guidelines, where does that leave the likes of Text Link Ads who make money for everyone in the blogosphere, including John Chow.
In Google’s quality guidelines I found this:
Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
I understand that Google wants to try and stop websites using Page Rank enhancing schemes, but surely this will have a backlash. For a start, there is an area in Google Webmaster Tools where you can tell Google about a site that you think is buying or selling links. I suspect this will inspire a situation in which people will start submitting their competitors’ websites, creating a vicious cycle.
What this means is that us bloggers have to be particularly careful about how we use this information. For example, if you have a section in your sidebar titled “Sponsors”, you might want to change that to “Recommend Links”, or something similar.
Matt Cutts had this to say on his blog on July 25:
As always, webmasters are free to do what they want on their own sites, but Google reserves the right to do what we think is best to maintain the relevance of our search results
When you think about it, this would be a sensible move were it not going to have such a gargantuan and confusing knock-on effect. The problem is that Google cannot tell the difference between a link you sell on your blog to someone who wants clicks and exposure to a link you sell to someone who wants page rank. And as for link exchanges, which are effectively the same thing as buying/selling text links, Google will have its work cut out to spot the difference.
How this will play out, particularly in the blogosphere where many top bloggers sell text links will be interesting.
