Google was developed, initially, by two university students as part of their PhD. Their theory was that sites on the web could be “ranked” in the same way you could rank the authority of an academic. Specifically, an academic who is well-established and often cited by other academics (in their papers) is more likely to be an authority on that topic.

Google applies the same logic to it’s crawl of the web and the more citations (or links) that a page and site has, the greater its rank (all other things being equal). In essence, therefore, Google is like a digital democracy (where a link from one site to another is treated as a vote for that site). In general, the greater the quantity – and quality – of links that your site gathers, the more your chances of winning the Google election.

Buying the election

Even as recently at 5-6 years ago, the web was still mainly an academic preserve and the majority of searches were for information, rather than for products and services. In such an environment, the original premise of Google’s algorithm worked well.

However, with internet sales now approaching 15% of all sales in the advanced Western Economies, these days of innocence have gone. There is big money flowing into the internet and chasing improved Google rankings. Getting links from very high PageRank pages (7 or more) can have a dramatic impact on the position of pages across your site and it may not surprise you to discover that links from PR8 sites are on sale (generally discretely) for $200 per month or more.

What may be less obvious to you is that Google itself could be at risk from this activity. As internet sales trend towards 40% of all sales (by the year 2020) the incidence of such “vote rigging” is likely to increase substantially. Once past a critical mass, paid links could significantly reduce the reliability and relevance of Google’s entire search results, turning users away.

After all, if a small elite group of politicians were rich enough to simply buy an entire election, who would bother to turn out and vote? And what validity would that government have? Most importantly, how long would the system of democracy itself survive?

The Can of Worms

So, as you can probably imagine, a lot of Google Engineer activity has recently been devoted to stamping out the malign influence of unethical vote buying. As Matt Cutts (chief Google spokesperson on SEO matters) puts it on his blog:

Google does consider buying text links for PageRank purposes to be outside our quality guidelines… Selling links muddies the quality of link-based reputation and makes it harder for many search engines (not just Google) to return relevant results. When the Berkeley college newspaper has six online gambling links (three casinos, two for poker, and one bingo) on its front page, it’s harder for search engines to know which links can be trusted. (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/text-links-and-pagerank/)

Tackling paid links, however, opens up a real “can of worms”. The prolems can be divided into (a) legal / regulatory, (b) ethical, and (c) practical. I will deal with these in reverse order:

Practically, it can be difficult to determine a “bad” paid link from a “legitimate” one! Many “sponsored links” are designed not for search engines but for traffic acquisition. A prominent link on an industry e-zine, for example, could be of great benefit to the paying website (in terms of the referrals which flow from clicks). How does one algorithmically distinguish between valid paid links or simple advertising (for traffic acquisition purposes) and those designed to artificially inflate organic rankings?

Ethically, many webmasters have pointed out that Google are themselves in the business of selling links (through Google Adwords) and this is where the vast majority of their revenue and profits come from. At what point does protecting digital democracy become stifling possible competitors? After all, if one views Adwords as being advertising and Organic results as being brand/PR, who would suggest that building a brand or engaging in PR must be absolutely for free? Is this really sustainable ethically? Or even practical in business terms?

Finally, there are interesting legal and antitrust issues tied up in all this. In 2003, Oklahoma-based SearchKing, which was in the business of selling paid links, sued Google for unfairly deflated their rankings and causing financial loss. Google won the case, based on the judgement that Google’s algorithm was protected by the First Amendment as an “opinion”. Whilst this case precedent is helpful to Google, it was surely based on the principle that a computer algorithm is an objective, automated calculation (rather than an actively manipulated one).

There have been other cases that have established that, where site owners choose to moderate user-created content (e.g. in a forum) then they take on the role of editor (rather than simply providing an environment for discourse). As such, they can then become liable for alleged defamation, libel and more. The implications of this? Well, in my opinion, if you let the robot (or the user) do the work without interference, you are safe – but the minute you start to manually moderate the results, then you have become an editor (and arguably lose much of your protection under law). Take out a competitor (when you already have an 80% market share) and the anti-trust lawyers will smell blood!

Observed Effects & Opinions

Google have made much – in interviews – of what I call their “snitchers charter”, where webmasters are encouraged to rat on each other’s unethical activity. The (notably unstated) implications are that, where unethical behaviour is detected, Google will penalise the site concerned (for breaches of their guidelines).

Whilst this undoubtedly happens (for extreme abuse) my opinion is that manual penalties (for paid links) are very rare. I base this opinion on three observations; (a) the effort required to police the entire web is probably beyond even Google and I would be surprised if they would even try, (b) there is much evidence of famous sites openly selling links (like linkadage.com) which still carry high PageRank, (c) for afforementioned legal reasons, Google would be much wiser to incorporate paid link deflation directly into their algorithm.

As such, I believe that Google uses the information from snitches solely to help better inform and plan algorithmic adjustments that will filter out the worst of the abuse automatically. This theory better fits the observed evidence.

Undoubtedly, Google are winning the war. Over the last six months, I have seen a total sea change in the PageRank of most paid link peddlers and low-value adding “SEO Directories”. I have also seen some sites which I consider to be “quality” losing out (perhaps unfairly) in the process. As an example, the mingleon.com directory (which used to be PageRank 7 and is now down to zero).

SEO Planning Points

If you have relied too heavily on paid links in your SEO strategy, you are likely to have seen a big drop in your rankings over the last 6-9 months. This is because some of the sites you have been getting links from have themselves been “zeroed” (as I call it) by Google’s more sophisticated paid link filters. As such, they pass you less value.

There are three things I would like you to consider:

1. Spread your SEO effort more broadly – by investing your website promotion time more evenly across a range of ethical activities, you are likely to be less vulnerable in future to sudden changes in the Google algorithm.
2. Focus on Quality rather than Quantity – Google PageRank is a zero-sum game. As many low-quality “built only for SEO” directories get “zeroed”, so the Page Rank of those who remain will go up. A paid listing, for example, with Yahoo or Best of the Web is unlikely to fall foul of the filter. Target sites which are (a) long-established, (b) human-reviewed, (c) have high editorial standards, (d) operate in your industry niche.
3. Use Link Rel No-Follow for Traffic Links – If your aim is genuinely to acquire traffic (for example from an e-zine) and not PageRank, consider the use of the schema Google themselves developed; rel="nofollow" (which informs the search engine to follow the link when indexing, but ignore it for the purposes of computing ranking). This will signal your ethical behaviour loud and clear.

Final Thoughts

Some commentators have used the “genie is out of the bottle” argument – i.e. that Google will struggle to keep up with the increased sophistication of paid link spammers (and the wall of money that drives them). They argue that it is time to look for a different way to rank websites (i.e. one not based on inbound links).

I have to say that I agree with this. It is little known (but a fact) that Ask.com and Google originally began from slightly different starting points on how to use links to rank sites. I call this “hub” and “spoke”. Google is based on a spoke system, where if many websites point into you (i.e. you are on the end of lots of spokes) you should rank well. Ask started from a hub system, where sites containing the highest number of useful outbound links on a topic would rank better (i.e. you are at the hub of lots of relevant spokes).

To put this another way, if Google seeks the greatest “authority” on a topic, Ask (at least originally) sought the best “critic”. A critic might write many different reviews on different academics without ever writing one academic article of their own on the topic. All the same, their review database and links list is still a good starting point for anyone new to the topic and keen to find out more.

So, my stunning conclusion; perhaps Google would be better putting more “hub” and less “spoke” into their algorithm as the best long-term antidote to paid link spam. After all, ecommerce sites are unlikely to link heavily to the sites of their competitors, whilst product review sites (with useful consumer information) would. Comments and debate are welcomed…