Google's Paid Link Crisis

I remember when I worked at O'Reilly and Associates as their in-house SEO many years ago I found out about this new search engine called Google. Most companies didn't know what SEO was and they certainly had never heard of Google search engine back then. When I discovered Google's new search engine I had a gut feeling they were going to be big so I made sure O'Reilly's pages were submitted early on back in the day of search engine submissions.

In the late 1990's things were simple. A link was a link. In fact, links were around long before Google ever was born. Too bad Google doesn't remember this. In fact webmasters linked to each other with no concern because they wanted to link to each other. Webmasters saw a great article they liked and linked to it. Webmasters even sold ads because it was their website and they were trying to make a profit. Pretty simple concept.

Google's crisis is the PageRank icon they created. Not so simple to tear down now apparently. They created it but can't control it. The world wide web is a growing entity. New ideas, new methods of providing users information and making a living off the web has been changing with the times. Google's initial idea of using link popularity to rank was built into their algorithm and the other search engines followed the leader.

And here we are today with Google deciding webmasters can't use paid links to make a living while Google makes its living from paid links. Its a sad statement really. From the beginning Google was focused on the search engine user. Things have changed. The reality is it is too difficult for Google to tell which ads are paid and which are not unless they use human evaluation. Imagine the number of pages they would have to evaluate manually. As webmasters and SEO's become more clever about linking its just going to get worse trying to detect paid links. Detecting paid links is not easy now, much less when paid links go underground.

My advice to Google is to share the wealth with folks trying to make a living on the web. Considering the web was around before Google appeared it seems like the user friendly thing to do.

Search Engine Land - The Big Paid Link Debate Roundup

List of discussions about Google's paid link crusade:
The Big Paid Link Debate Roundup