As many know, last week the Google gods unleashed vengeance on many sites peddling links for dollars. Some of these sites were major publishers. Sites like Forbes.com saw their PageRank drop from a 7 to a 4.

Of course whenever Google does this type of update, the world of search marketing is turned upside down for a day or two. But after having some time to asses the damage done, I found I was very happy to see the results of some good Google justice.

As most who read this know, one of NetResults companies is Blogitive. Blogitive was the first site to pay blogger to post reviews of sites, products and press releases. There is little point of denying that a major motivating factor of Blogitive clients is to boost up their search rankings by getting blogs to write about, and link to them. But as I have long said, that’s not a bad thing even in Google’s mind.

But Blogitive faced competition from the companies that sell text link ads on popular websites. They idea of these company is that having a link on a powerful site, regardless of the relevancy of the page, will boost your site’s rankings. I have seen this backfire on a good amount of clients, but never in a way that was very public to these brokers. But with this last update I think Google has really pierced the heart of the text link brokers industry. Here is why.

Text link brokers have two different entities to deal with; publishers and customers. The basic idea is that a text link broker will offer to help a publisher, who normally sells banner ads on a CPM basis, sell text link ads on the site at a flat monthly rate. This rate is based on the PageRank of the website. If you’re PageRank is a 7, then you can usually count a few hundred dollars per month, per client. This can add up quickly and before too long you have publishers bringing in $10k per month from selling little text links at the bottom of the page. Of course the broker is making their money by re-selling these links to companies looking for a bump in Google. These links often sit on the bottom of pages and have no real relevancy. It’s hard to deny that the primary reason for these links is to manipulate the Google algorithm.

Google came out with a solution for companies, that was in hindsight a early warning for publishers, over a year ago. Google recommended that when companies are selling text links ads, they include a “nofollow” tag so that search engines didn’t count the links. This suggestion would have made most of these links useless to the clients, so this suggestions was mostly ignored.

But now Google has gone through a dropped the PageRank of massive amount of sites selling links. And here is why it was a smart way for Google to handle this. Imagine you work for a big publisher with a PageRank of 7, and search rankings provide roughly 35% of your traffic. When you see that Google has penalized your website for selling links and dropped you to a PR4, you pick up the phone and call your text link broker. Now if you’re a smart publisher, you realize the game is up. You tell the text link broker to get lost, remove the links and make what ever mea culpa to Google you can. If you’re an unwise publisher, you let the broker talk you into keeping the program, but just remove the links from the home page. I’m not making this up, I saw a site take this approach, like Google is blind. But there is more bad news…

On the other line, the link broker has the client calling to complain that the links aren’t working. Now a smart client will tell the link broker to get lost and try to build links in the proper fashion. But an unwise client will stay with the link broker, but they will notice that they are paying PR7 prices for a PR4 site. I’m sure you can guess what conversation is awaiting the publisher.

After taking the hit in PageRank, the publisher site is now not worth nearly as much. So now that $10k per month is reduced to $4k. Of course even the unwise publisher at this point will likely leave the program, leaving the link broker with one less piece of inventory. Multiply this by hundreds of websites and I think we can all feel a little sympathy for text link ad brokers today.

But here is why I’m happy about this; I do not like text link brokers. They are sloppy in their attempt to manipulate Google and they usually screw over their clients by linking them from sites they know are not passing through PageRank, the whole time risking the clients’ rankings.

Now for a plug. Blogitive doesn’t have these issues. When you go through Blogitive you are not paying for links. You are paying for bloggers to look over your press release, write up a unique, relevant, and hopefully interesting blog post about your company. The blogger of course links to you, and that pushes your rankings higher. Google is concerned about sites who throw up links on the bottom of pages that have no value other than to trick their engine. The Google algorithm likes blogs, and they count their links. Google likes unique, relevant, and hopefully interesting content. They do not concern themselves with the motivation of why the content was written.

So if you’re looking where to put you link buying budget, I think you should look into Blogitive.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 31st, 2007 at 3:13 pmand is filed under Search Engine Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.