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How much would you pay for this link?

Posted by admin on December 12, 2006 in Link Building

When Rand Fishkin came back to Seattle from the December 2006 SES Chicago, he wrote on SEOmoz that “Search Engines Say OK to Pay-per-Post Services”. If you follow that link, you’ll find a comment where Google Webspam engineer Matt Cutts says:

Just to chime in and expand on Adam’s comment: Google wants to do a good job of detecting paid links. Paid links that affect search engines (whether paid text links or a paid review) can cause a site to lose trust in Google.

The pay-per-post services — just now being launched — are expected to be tomorrow’s link spam. After all, people like me and Jim Boykin have been telling people to surround links with text for quite some time. In fact, spam paragraphs have been the mainstay of scraper sites for a couple of years.

But now the search engines (read: Google) can detect and filter out spam paragraphs. The day of the paragraph-wrapped link is almost dead. Ironically, many SEO forums still have threads where people ask if it’s okay to get a link on a page which has nothing more than a long list of links. In another year or so, people will start asking if it’s a good idea to wrap links in a paragraph of text.

If I elect to monetize this blog, I can’t really count on savvy people wanting to buy a paragraph of text. I have to sell the whole article or nothing. But at what reasonable rate can I get away with it, though? 1 out of 50? 1 out of 25? Could I sell 1 in 10 links?

And you should be asking right now: Did Jim Boykin and Rand Fishkin buy my links in this article? How would anyone know? I’m not going to put “Sponsored link” in front of a link to We Build Pages, am I? (I “nofollowed” it Jim — didn’t get your check.)

Paid links are the bogey-man of SEO today. 1 year ago it was free articles and press releases. 18 months ago it was free directories. 2 years ago it was reciprocal links. Everyone is afraid of paid links but they keep sticking their necks out, waiting to get their heads chopped off, because they are scared not to.

You have to be competitive and to too many people, for all the wrong reasons, that seems to mean buying (or selling) links.

Matt and other Googlers tell us that Google wants to place its trust in “editorially chosen” links. Of course, there have never really been many such links. Long before Google existed Web sites were selling links (text advertising, graphical advertising) and exchanging links and distributing free content with embedded links, etc. That is, everything which is evil spam under Google’s system was considered a legitimate promotional activity prior to Google’s creation.

Google, being the 1,000 pound gorilla that it is, actually gets to shake the cage and frighten the Webmasters who want to trade links and promote their sites with “Web traditional” advertising. And people are frightened. They no longer want to link to bad neighborhoods even though they are uncertain about what constitutes a bad neighborhood (although common sense should tell you — would you want your Web pages to show up here or there?). Magnanimously, Google now says, “If you use rel=nofollow we’ll trust you better because we’ll know that you are exercising editorial choice.”

Do you know, I still don’t think most SEOs have quite gotten the message? For almost two years we’ve been looking at “rel=nofollow” as meaning “I don’t trust that site” but really it tells Google, “Hey, you can trust me because I’m exercising editorial control”. Yes, we’re about to see the dawn of a new age in link spam: pages are going to place rel=nofollow on links just to prove their trustworthiness. Think it will fool the filters?

In a way, Google’s changing the rules has helped millions of Webmasters around the Web because we have become so formulaic and predictable that we can actually count on generating X dollars with Y pages. If you have 1,000 pages of content that each get 3 visitors a day, your 3 visitors can generate maybe $5 in revenue for you. If you have 1 million pages of content, your 3 visitors can generate maybe $5000 in revenue for you. That’s the formula.

Leaving Google AdSense aside, it can be reasonably shown that the SEO community misunderstands the power of links anyway. Too many so-called gurus and forum know-it-alls still blather on about how you need to get links to rank your sites. That’s absolute nonsense. Plenty of sites achieve high rankings in very competitive expressions with a minimal number of links. This has been happening for years.

The reason so is that Google has been actively devaluing links through the past several years. The massive volumes of links that Webmasters have been scooping up, hand-over-fist, in a link-building frenzy for the past few years have largely been ignored, filtered, devalued, or otherwise rendered invisible to itself by Google for much of the past 2-3 years. If we assume for the sake of discussion that 90% of your inbound links don’t help with your Google rankings at all, we’re being extremely liberal and generous in assessing the value of your linkage.

So, you may have 10,000 backlinks, but odds are pretty good you only have a few that actually help you. If you have good rankings, you may not be getting those rankings the way you think you are. Most often, that is what I find, when I look at people’s sites.

Huge whompin’ sites like CNN, Amazon, eBay, etc. have millions of inbound links that actually help them — deep links, trusted deep links, trusted deep links that actually send traffic. Those links may help with Google rankings, in fact they probably do, but really only because they are editorially given. How many times a day do you put “rel=nofollow” on a link to CNN? Most of you have probably never thought about doing such a thing. After all, it’s CNN. It’s MSNBC. It’s FOX.

Nonetheless, links are not relevant to user queries. Text is relevant to queries. Links may confer value (which includes text) to the pages they point to. If a link passes value in the form of anchor text, it may help boost that target page’s relevance to a few words. How much internal PageRank helps boost a page’s ability to rank in a SERP is questionable. For the vast majority of link-spammed pages internal PageRank probably has a minimal effect if any. For sites like CNN, Amazon, eBay, etc. PageRank probably helps considerably.

The value a link confers can be measured according to one standard (the Webmaster’s) or another (Google’s) but not both standards, unless you’re CNN, Amazon, eBay, etc..

A Webmaster’s value for a link is defined by the user experience the link produces. Does the link compel visitors to click on it? Does the link build brand value? Does the link help spiders find valuable content? Does the link show search engines that the page it is embedded in is not a dead end? This is not the same as the value that you may place in your inbound linkage. It’s the value the link actually confers to you the Webmaster.

But SEO Webmasters rarely think in these terms. They think in terms of “I need PageRank and anchor text” even though they really have no idea of whether they are getting PageRank and anchor text. And if they do get PageRank and anchor text, most of them don’t know what to do with it. Take a look at any random business site and see if it has a link with the anchor text of “home”. Ask yourself: What is the value of “home”? And yet, most SEOs appear not to give any consideration to how the home page is linked to by other pages on the site.

eCommerce site operators often tell me they cannot get their product pages listed. When I ask what links they build to those pages, they reply in exasperation: “I have 10,000 pages — I don’t have time to build links to them.” And yet, they have time to build the pages. If you can build a Web page, you can build links. It’s that simple. If you don’t place value in your own content, why should anyone else? If you have 10,000 product pages and they all link to the root URL with the anchor text of, say, “pizza”, as well as to a few sibling pages (with anchor text relevant to those pages), you may not knock Pizza Hut out of the top slot but you’ll definitely make your home page more relevant to “pizza” than the local pizzeria(at least until the filters are tightened a little more).

So, which will be less expensive for you: add a few links to your own content on your 10,000 pages or buy link placement on 10,000 pages on other people’s sites? How much are you willing to pay me for a link back to your business site? Will you trust me to choose where to place that link?

What if I told you I helped a company build a national distribution system with a single link? It’s true. I’ve helped more than one business experience tremendous growth. I don’t build links. I build value. And sometimes I express that value in terms of the links I give out (though I have never sold a link).

Maybe I should be charging for those links. Funny thing is, most link buyers would ask me what my Toolbar PageRank is, or how many visitors I get. Why should you care, though, if I can help increase your revenue by tens of thousands of dollars per year for a local business or millions of dollars per year for a national business? I’ve done both.

Frankly, you can’t pay me enough for one of my links. I’m not sure you realize what that could cost me. That’s the value I place in my content, my links. What value do you place in yours?