In a new crack-down Google asks people to report paid links found on Web sites.

One way to generate revenue for a site is to get paid for links. Google’s own Adsense ads are one way of getting such links (you’ll find some of them on this page).

However, Google’s ads do not transfer “link juice”. In other words: Google and other search engines do not count a Google Adsense link on Pandia’s page as a vote of confidence for the page the ad is pointing to. The link does not affect the ranking of that page.

But the number and quality of inbound links is important, and if you can get links from sites that are trusted by the search engines your own standing will improve. No wonder there are sites out there trying to buy such links.

Google has never been happy about paid links. They believe that they influence the search ranking algorithm in a a negative way.

After all, the webmaster putting up such links does not do it because she believes it is a quality page of relevance to its readers. She puts it up because it pays.

Report on paid links

Google’s Matt Cutts now asks webmasters to report on paid links:

“Google may provide a special form for paid link reports at some point, but in the mean time, here’s a couple of ways that anyone can use to report paid links:

- Sign in to Google’s webmaster console and use the authenticated spam report form, then include the word “paidlinkâ€? (all one word) in the text area of the spam report. (…)
- Use the unauthenticated spam report form and make sure to include the word “paidlinkâ€? (all one word) in the text area of the spam report.”

How to identify a paid link

This has caused a lot of anger in the search engine marketing community. Many sites live on selling links. Google lives on selling links. So, how on earth can Google ask people not to sell links?

It turns out Cutts is not actually warning people not to sell links per se. You can sell links for traffic.

What Google does not like is that you sell links for pagerank. The point is that Google needs to know the difference.

Cutts has earlier argued that you should put in a “rel=nofollow� tag in paid links, i.e. a tag that tells the search engine not to transfer link juice to the page it is pointing to.

However, there are other ways, Cutts says:

“I believe AdBrite constructs their links with JavaScript so that links are being sold for traffic, not to affect search engines. Things like JavaScript, the nofollow attribute (or meta tag), or doing a link through a redirect that is robots.txt’ed out would be techniques to sell links for visitors/traffic, as opposed to trying to influence search engine rankings.”

Human readable disclosure

In another post he adds that you could label the link in a way that makes it clear to the reader that this is a paid link:

“The other best practice I’d advise is to provide human readable disclosure that a link/review/article is paid. You could put a badge on your site to disclose that some links, posts, or reviews are paid, but including the disclosure on a per-post level would better. Even something as simple as ‘This is a paid review’ fulfills the human-readable aspect of disclosing a paid article.”

However, he does not say whether such “human readable disclosure” is enough to placate Google, or whether you need to add a nofollow tag in addition to labeling the links as “Sponsored” or “Paid review”.

Paid links will not be punished?

Another misunderstanding is that this has been interpreted to mean that Google will penalize sites with paid links — i.e. that they will get lower rankings as the result of having paid links.

Actually, Cutts have never said that. The point is apparently to reduce the effect of paid links algorithm wise to zero.

Still, Google is clearly punishing sites that rely on the income from regular paid links. Many of them will loose an important stream of revenue.

A step too far?

At Pandia we are not comfortable with this development. We do understand Google’s need to combat spam, and we realize that paid links have become and impediment to Google’s ability to deliver good results.

Still, the World Wide Web was not made for the search engines, nor were the standards for linking between sites. Paid links may perfectly well be relevant links, also to regular Web site visitors, and we find it often extremely hard to distinguish between them.

At Pandia we do have paid links. They are clearly labeled with the word “Sponsors”, and we have included a nofollow tag - out of fear of Google mostly.

But many of our sponsors deliver content and services that are highly relevant to our readers, and we link to the same sites in articles and resource collections elsewhere on the site (in the same way as we do to non-paying sites).

It would make no sense to use to mark those links with a nofollow tag, as that would mean that we (and Google) are punishing sites that deliver good and relevant content and services.

Is it our job to fix the quality of Google’s search?

Google is now asking us (the webmasters) and others (reporting readers) to identify paid and — from a content perspective — irrelevant links.

Surely there must be a better and more objective and reliable way of correcting for this factor? Should it really be the responsibility of webmasters to fix weaknesses in Google’s search algorithm?

After all, we are not talking about hidden links, cloaking or spam here. We are talking about regular links, the heartbeat of hypertext.

The black hats will find a way

Now we will see a new burst of innovation in the search marketing community: Webmasters will find new ways of include a paid link in regular article text without making it look like one. If there is a market, the experts will find a way.

It is the non-experts — i.e. the mom an pop sites — that will now abandon this paid link market, and they are the ones that need this income the most.

What others say:

Google To Go After Paid Links? (Search Engine Journal):

“Check out Matt Cutts’s post How to report paid links and notice that he appears not to have responded to the comments that mention Text Link Ads or similar brokers. This will be a huge disappointment to all those small websites that make a bit of money selling sponsored links (…)

Google seems to be going after a monopoly on advertising, telling webmasters what they can or cannot have on their sites. Does anyone else now think it’s a conflict of interest that search engine as powerful as Google is monopolizing advertising?”

Paid Links Are Spam? (Google Blogoscoped):

“Indeed, Google, ideally, should behave as a passive by-stander. It shouldn’t tell people how to make websites. That is the responsibility of the webmaster, who can and should of course check the recommendations put forth by the web’s standards body, the W3C.”

Google Wants Reports of Paid Links … What a Joke (Threadwatch)

“Google is still indexing those lolita preteen results, ranks all these .edu ringtone pages, and lets not forget that Google continues to deliver AdSense ads on sites they banned for being spam. If Google doesn’t CLEARLY mark their own paid links, encourages publishers to blend them into content, and doesn’t police their own network, why do they think they have the right to police other sites?”

Google Goes to War on Paid Text Links (Search Engine Watch):

“There are certainly paid links that affect search result quality, and Google has every right to deal with those. But to say that human-reviewed, relevant paid links will be punished is another situation entirely. That makes it look like Google is flexing its muscles as the dominant search engine to take out competitors of its own text ad program.”

How Can So Many PHD’s Be So Wrong? (Graywolf)

“As I commented on Matt’s blog this is actually another example of Google’s hypocrisy. The webmaster guidelines clearly say the litmus test is ‘Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?’. Adding machine readable ‘no follow’ tags or redirecting through blocked redirect script seems to be for the search engines and not the users.”