The battle between Search Engines and paid links, will it ever end?

It`s been an ongoing battle for some time now, and as Randfish mentioned in a post on this topic, most people are still completely unaware of the difference between sponsored and paid links. There seems to be so much confusion and uncertainty that these discussions appear to be going around in circles without much resolution.

It`s a fact that the more links a site has, the more relevant Google believes the site is and thus the higher the site will rank when someone performs a search. Higher rankings mean more traffic, thus more online sales.

But the way you attain these links has to be approved and pass the stringent rules that have been put in place by the search engine police.

Google’s Webmaster guidelines ban buying links just to boost up search rankings. And thus other search engines including Ask, MSN, and Yahoo! that follow Google’s link-based search rankings, also frown upon buying and selling links.

The problem is that, as Web commerce booms, so has the value of links, and although Google is getting innovative with its defenses, so are “spam sites”. There is a vast amount of websites that are engaged in link buying that Google would consider “un-trustworthy.” But, as you see in the search results of thousands of commercially competitive terms, paid links are still dominating.

Rand and other search marketers say link directories are the biggest culprits and thus the subject of Google’s growing crackdown on the buying and selling of links on Web pages. These sites sell links by the hundreds or the thousands and clearly violate Google’s guidelines. Rand goes on to say that reports so far indicate that only a handful of link directories have been punished, and these are only a tiny fraction of those that exist!

“They’re seeing a heavy amount of manipulating, and they want to show what it looks like when they take punitive action. It’s intended more as public relations than anything else.”

There are so many different factors to consider and there are several examples of where Google has turned a blind eye to sites selling links. Google itself will still allow paid links to be promoted in another way, through its own ads.

Matt Cutts from Google responds to this notion by saying that unlike hidden paid links, Google’s, Adwords advertisements don’t bias Google’s search results. And when it comes to producing unbiased answers, what’s good for Google is good for users. “I think the reason people come to Google is the quality of the search results,” he says. “Users don’t want to see results sorted by who has the biggest wallet.”

In April, he asked users to report sites they spotted running paid links, and maintained that they certainly do consider buying links to be outside of their guidelines, and that they may take stronger action on that in the future. But as a search engine, they can do what they think is best to return a high quality index. It`s their index and therefore, they can do exactly as they please.

Google will always manage to stop the noticeable “paid links” but there will always be some that get through. As long as revenue continues to be generated, the demand will remain and the search engineers will have to up there tactics if they wish bring this to a halt

As we can see, there is a great deal of back and forth debate on this contentious topic: What paid links should be allowed? How can you bypass the search engine police and why are innocent parties being penalised without being warned? It`s all a bit daunting.

As Danny Sullivan states in his post on Sunday:

“Google is not telling people what to do with their sites, which is a popular argument point. Google is telling people what to do if they are concerned about doing better in Google. Don’t want to be harmed in Google? Don’t sell links.”

Personally, I am not sure if I completely agree, I do think that Google needs to take a closer look at their Algorithm as this issue obviously is extremely important to webmasters everywhere. They may need to take a step back, focus and take more active steps to clean up the loose ends and confusion. If they do this I feel it will certainly contribute to an improved understanding by all parties affected!