So what do you think would happen if lots of webmasters, bloggers and other assorted online ner’do’well’s like myself decided to help Stephen Colbert be named the Greatest Living American? Mr. Colbert figures that if Google says he is the Greatest Living American then it must be truthy enough to be true. At this point, every American and every Americaphile should be asking themselves, “What could we possibly do to help Mr. Colbert achieve his goal?” This is better than messing with that guy’s placement on Idol.
As we all know, American political and public relations campaigns are all about the money. It takes money to get noticed in the cacophony of our modern media culture. Since we are webmasters, we probably don’t have enough money to spare to make much of a difference but we do have something even more valuable than money, at least more valuable online. We have links, and being good webmasters, we can do pretty much anything we want with them provided we are willing to invest the time and effort in using them properly.
Links are, for good or for ill, commodities traded between webmasters, businesses and bloggers. Sometimes they are sold as commercial advertisements and sometimes they are traded in the never ending series of favours between webmasters. Links have great power on the web and that power is part and parcel of how the web operates.
As almost everyone with a G button on their keyboard knows, link-power is a big part of how Google operates. From its earliest days, Google has measured the worth or relevance of a site based on values it applies to links found on, directed to, or leaving a particular web document. While there are literally hundreds of factors that go into the weight any particular link might be granted in Google’s eyes, the fact that Google looks at links when deciding the placement of a web document in its index makes links between pages an important part of its ranking algorithms for SEOs to consider.
Mr. Colbert has NOT paid Metamend or myself for the link placed above. Neither Metamend or myself are in the business of selling links. Some of our colleagues are and, over the last few years, they have done extremely well financially. They have also done well by their clients who have strong search placements.
A few days ago, Matt Cutts wrote a highly controversial blog post asking webmasters and Google users to point out paid links. It is assumed by the SEO community that Google wants to devalue those links in order to prevent or deter an industry built around squeezing juice out of those links.
That seems counter-productive to me. There are dozens of reasons paid-links are of use to webmasters and to web site visitors, simple advertising being the most obvious. For webmasters, financial survival might be a reason to include paid links on a site.
If our understanding of the other facets of Google’s algorithm are even close to correct, shouldn’t Google itself be able to determine the relative value of a link from one page leading to another? The key was supposed to be in relevancy. Does the link support information found on or about the documents linked together? Is there any form of topical relevancy between documents? Why does this link exist in the first place?
Google’s webmaster guidelines are generally considered a standard for client-serving SEO firms. The “rules”, such as they are, are laid out by Google in order to give webmasters basic suggestions on how Google ranks sites and what goes against Google’s wishes. A consistent theme in those guidelines is the phrase, “Does this help my users?” That seems like a common sense measurement of link-goodness against link-badness.
Chasing after paid links is a fools errand, one I am surprised to see such intelligent people pursue. Given the power of links and the way they are traded between webmasters, every link is a paid link. Someone took the time and effort to code them. Unless obviously irrelevant, perhaps the financial value of any given link should be the business of the webmaster, not the web service. (not unless that web service was thinking about getting into linking themselves… oh yeah… they’ve been doing that commercially for a few years too). Friday is gonna be a gas.
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