Zawodny Finishes Sponsored Links Experiment
04 January 2006 10:35 AM | Search Engines
Jeremy Zawodny has issued an update on his experiment with
selling sponsored links on his blog.
The problem here is I hate the way the search engines, particularly Google, control the debate on this issue. (Disclaimer: I sell all my advertising on all my sites through Adbrite which gives no link juice.) But webmasters ignore warnings from Google's Matt Cutts at their peril.
Here is my opinion:
Right or wrong has little to do with this issue, this is about Google being threatened by any artificial manipulation of linking. They can and will use their raw power to protect their turf. Webmasters may have the right to sell any kind of link they want but Google will probably do bad things to you if you do.
Google simply has too much market and mind share to be ignored. Ultimately they will fail to hold back the tide on artificial link inflation and their index will degrade (IMO it already has.) I also think that selling ads on a site per-click, like Adsense, does not favor the site owner because the advertisers still get branding value off the ad impressions even if there is no click and the webmaster is not getting paid for that by Google.
The search engines (one of which I work for) would rather that paid links be tagged with a rel="nofollow" attribute to indicate that any "link juice" or authority shouldn't be passed on to that site.
The problem here is I hate the way the search engines, particularly Google, control the debate on this issue. (Disclaimer: I sell all my advertising on all my sites through Adbrite which gives no link juice.) But webmasters ignore warnings from Google's Matt Cutts at their peril.
Here is my opinion:
Right or wrong has little to do with this issue, this is about Google being threatened by any artificial manipulation of linking. They can and will use their raw power to protect their turf. Webmasters may have the right to sell any kind of link they want but Google will probably do bad things to you if you do.
Google simply has too much market and mind share to be ignored. Ultimately they will fail to hold back the tide on artificial link inflation and their index will degrade (IMO it already has.) I also think that selling ads on a site per-click, like Adsense, does not favor the site owner because the advertisers still get branding value off the ad impressions even if there is no click and the webmaster is not getting paid for that by Google.
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