Many of you have probably heard about Google’s recent frontal assault on the paid link industry. Let’s face it, we all knew that day was coming… we just didn’t know how or when. Well, the cat’s out of the bag and the jig is apparently up for those who found themselves overly enamored with the text ad link brokers of the world. It’s a heated debate, and I’ll probably take some heat for my perspective on this, but I think the move was brilliant on Google’s part.

I’ve been a long proponent of the argument that the importance of Page Rank is completely dependent on your interpretation of Page Rank to begin with. To me, there is more than one form of Page Rank. The first form that most people obsess on is visible Page Rank… the one that graces the web browsers of those who have downloaded the Google toolbar. The there’s the other form, the invisible one that is the basis of Google’s ranking algorithm (aka. the one that matters).

For the record, Google rarely updates visible Page Rank (approx. 3-4 times per year). The invisible form never sleeps and is at work 24/7 as Google sifts through mounds of content in search of the most trustworthy and authoritative content that has earned the right to grace the first page of their ranking results. Bottom line folks… visible Page Rank simply doesn’t matter. It’s the invisible cousin that you need to focus your efforts on.

OK, so what did Google do to combat paid linking and why was it so “brilliant”. Well, they basically identified and isolated sites that were selling ad space to text ad link brokers for the purpose of publishing text links on behalf of advertisers who were looking to acquire text links from authoritative web sites in order to increase their organic search engine rankings.

How did they identify these sites? Let’s face it, the little box near the footer of each page that said “Sponsored Links” or “Sponsored Advertisements” were kind of a dead freakin’ give away. Heck, Google’s own hotsheet for their Adsense program that shows publishers where to place their Adwords to achieve the highest yield should have clued us all in to the fact that Google already had an idea where commercial links were most likely to exist on a web page!

But what was wrong with the text link ads to begin with? Well, Google has answered that question emphatically with a question of their own for years now. If the links aren’t intended to game their search results, then why not apply a nofollow tag to alert the engines to ignore the link. Kinda kills both birds with one stone doesn’t it?

So, what did Google do? They played on the fact that the vast majority of text ad link brokers use visible page rank as a proxy to determine the market price of their links. The higher the Page Rank… the higher the premium advertisers paid for the link. The SEO world debated the potential impact of such a broad sweeping witch hunt for years. Wouldn’t Google be shooting themselves in the foot if they reduced the Page Rank of respected, authoritative web sites. Shoot, Forbes.com publishes these links. Can you imagine Google’s results for “business news” and “financial news” without Forbes.com in it?

Well… that argument presumed that a reduction in visible Page Rank would have an equivalent impact on the site’s ability to rank within their index. And in hindsight, that presumption was fatally flawed. Forbes still ranks as high as they always have for business news and financial news. In my opinion, they’re still authoritative in Google’s eyes, they’re just not trustworthy with respect to their ability to pass Page Rank along to other sites.

How interesting would it have been to be a fly on the wall when the text ad link brokers of the world had to call their publishers and on one hand apologize for the adverse effect their links had on the publishers visible Page Rank… and on the other hand had to break the news that the fees advertisers were willing to pay for the links had to be reduced to account for their loss in visible Page Rank? Yikes!

Game, Set, Match…?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 at 2:29 amand is filed under Internet Marketing(t) , Search Engine Marketing(t) . 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.