How long will people be able to buy their way to the top of Google?

asianslave · 2009-05-27, 06:03 PM

To play the devil's advocate:

* buying links is no different from what's always been happening in link trading: an exchange of value. Instead of trading traffic and link juice, people who buy links have just formalized the arrangement by putting a dollar value on the trades and making them one way.

* most of the sites in the top of the serps buying links are actually pretty good sites that offer what the surfer wants... at least, they're no worse than the rest of the crap filling up the adult serps. The bottom line is that most adult sites aren't actually very good.

* it's actually pretty difficult to differentiate between discrete bought and organic links. If I get listed on a social bookmarking site then I'll see a rapid surge in backlinks in a way similar to lots of paid links coming in. You also can't really punish people for buying even tangentally related text links - it's just another media buy.

I personally am a miser and so am not into buying links, but I just view it as part of the maturation of the SEO industry. You can't stop it.

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2009-05-27, 06:03 PM	#1
asianslave Aw, Dad, you've done a lot of great things, but you're a very old man, and old people are useless Join Date: Sep 2008 Posts: 28	To play the devil's advocate: * buying links is no different from what's always been happening in link trading: an exchange of value. Instead of trading traffic and link juice, people who buy links have just formalized the arrangement by putting a dollar value on the trades and making them one way. * most of the sites in the top of the serps buying links are actually pretty good sites that offer what the surfer wants... at least, they're no worse than the rest of the crap filling up the adult serps. The bottom line is that most adult sites aren't actually very good. * it's actually pretty difficult to differentiate between discrete bought and organic links. If I get listed on a social bookmarking site then I'll see a rapid surge in backlinks in a way similar to lots of paid links coming in. You also can't really punish people for buying even tangentally related text links - it's just another media buy. I personally am a miser and so am not into buying links, but I just view it as part of the maturation of the SEO industry. You can't stop it.