There’s a lot of talk and rumour floating around SEO circles at the moment regarding Google’s attitude and apparent clamp down on paid for links on websites. For those that don’t know the score: everyone seemingly wants a higher Google page rank (PR) because higher PR equals higher Search Engine positions (SERPs), right? So, using basic SEO methodology whereby sites with PR linking to other sites effectively pass a vote of confidence in the destination site, unscrupulous Webmasters have been buying up high PR links to point to their site using the Google bombing technique to strengthen SERP’s on specific key phrases.
So, what’s the problem? Well to be honest, it’s a bit rich coming from Google because at the end of the day, their paid for advertising business model is built on the fundamental principles of linking to sites through textual advertising. What’s annoyed the boys and girls at Google HQ is the apparent attempts to undermine their algorithm using these techniques.
But how do Google recognise a ‘paid for link’? Good question. How can they? We think it’s no coincidence that Google have actively increased their exposure and opportunities for webmasters to ‘grass’ on such sites either selling or benefiting from paid links, but is this all Google have? Having looked through Google best practice pages earlier today, we see that they don’t entirely want to destroy the paid link marketplace, but suggest this:
* Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the tag * Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file
Google go on to explain that a site with good unique quality content will naturally attract sites linking to it anyway but the problem is, not all of us have unique content sites (I’d say very few do) and even those that do, still need to attract the linking sites in the first place - a bit of chicken and egg scenario.
Where will it all end? Google now say they don’t approve of active reciprocal linking, they don’t approve of paid for text linking to manipulate their algorithms, and they don’t like Directories very much either. This begs the obvious question: How important is Page Rank nowadays? There is a definite kudos value but anything tangible? Sites with low or even zero PR are appearing above sites with high PR. We can honestly say, the latest PR assessment has made very little difference to sites we monitor either in terms of an increase in SERPs for those with PR improvement or a drop for those with a decrease.
At the end of the day, some elements of SEO can be so borderline between being ethical and unethical, that we feel many a good guy is going to get penalised through unintentionally annoying Google, and some of the unethical black hat guys will still benefit from PR manipulation.
Will PR still be around 2 years from now? There’s increased talk that possibly not…but time will surely tell.
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(wb) Russ