Google Webmaster Tools Vs Paid Links!
Good move Google!
SEO Standards
I was reading this week an article about introduction of standards into Search Engine Marketing and the SEO Community by Chris Boggs.
I whole heartedly agree that the industry has attracted a number of new players into the market place that are inexperienced and poorly qualified – but then hasn’t every industry? Each industry develops its own mechanisms and processes for weeding out the men from the boys or the sharks from the virtuous.
In a very natural way, pricing determines what you are going to get.
Anyway, this post is not going to follow the route of a full discussion on the quality assurance mechanisms for the industry, I just wanted to demonstrate a move Google has taken to rid the market of “Paid Linking” practices.
Paid Links – A good way to go?
A colleague of mine was blogging recently and said, sure -what’s the issue with paid links? All links are good -surely? and I declined to comment. Had I had more time and the inclination I should have gone on to point out what the actual issues are.
Like everything else in life – there’s no shortcuts: SEO done properley requires effort. If you’re looking for a shortcut to traffic generation, you want PPC.
The foundation of SEO is built upon the user experience at the search engine interface and the user experience when they get to the website they choose to investigate – the former always has to come first, otherwise, we negate the need for SEO.
What’s important to the individual at the search engine interface is that they get back a SERPS set that demonstrates authority on a given subject (key phrase). We have all been there, searching for something and all we get back is a range of dross and no matter how complex the boolean operators we use to query, we still get advertising portals full of adverts and nothing about our chosen subject.
My Ideal
My ideal for a search engine is to follow the fine example of indexing by the International Book Publishing Industry and Libraries Services – ISBN Codes and Dewy Decimal! If I could tell the search engine that i’m not interested in commercial sites as part of my search, then I would get closer to the results I actually want. Technorati has made a move with Blogging to get users to assess authority and they also have a rank system for blogs. Quite a useful concept.
Anyway, I digress again – Google has introduced “Report Paid Links” into it’s Webmaster Tools.
Webmaster Tools
When you login to Webmaster Tools on the right hand side of the screen is an option to “Report Paid Links”. This is a direct move by Google to identify who has purchased links and who has sold them. Don’t think that you can nobble a competitor either by reporting paid links when thats not the case. The software Google deploys can identify a true case of paid linking just in the same way it has the sophistication to identify duplicate content of a paragraph of text across billions of web pages!
Google Says NO to Paid Links
That’s a great move for improving the quality of SERPS provided by Google and great for the industry too.
Great Result for the SEO Community
When you come to doing your next search in Google it’s now more likely that the sites at the top have a natural authority for being there.
