Buying Links what if

“would that stop the linking buying … Hell yer of course it would why pay for something if it’s going to have no real influence in the organic Serps.”

Just to clarify, are you saying that you view SERP advancement as the only reasonable purpose for buying links?

Buying links for PR or buying links for natural traffic?

Nothing wrong with buying links if it’s bringing in quality natural traffic and if G say there is then they’ve pretty much detached themselves from the real world.

If you want an offline advert for your offline business, you’ll pay for an advert – maybe it’s a full blown Saatchi and Saatchi campaign or maybe it’s just a card in a shop window. Either way, it’s buying traffic.

If you’re buying to artificially raise the PR value of the site then yes it’s probably wise that Google knock that one on the head.

I agree totally and so do Google that’s why they want us to use Nofollow, but while you get traffic and a boost in serps then we want the boost…

“…using Googles own systems like Feedburner, analytics’s and adwords in the future may just be the key to ranking high in organic.”

So does it mean those who do not use their services will suffer? This sounds like monopolization – this is a bit scary, I must say. Well, of course, those who do not want to be indexed in Google, are free in their choice, but this seems not right to me.

I am of the opinion user data is already being used as a trust indicator by Google. I have seen a number of examples of sites that only trust indicator is PPC. No links, small sites, but huge amounts of traffic from PPC (and only ppc). They start to rank in the top 30 or so for very competitive terms based on this traffic (in my opinion). Now to go top 10 they still need links and other trust indicators, but user data has to play a part.

So what would happen if links were taken out of the algo and it bacame a user data based algo? There would be one of two ways to start a new site and rank. Social media, or huge ad buys.

I have no problem with that

I think they are already using this data. I have noticed that if I sign up for everything, including feedburner, technorati, bloglines, google analytics, linkedin, etc…suddenly I get a boost. Adwords helps too. But if they suddenly dumped links, what would wikipedia do?

i agree with you thats why the concept nofollow came into picture.
now directories are our only reprieve.

I think a lot of us will be poppin’ champaign corks on that day

Then they will have to publish another Webmaster Guide to encourage webmasters to use their services and to learn to manipulate the internal stats! This will lead to another war: Google fighting buying and selling feedburner subcsriptions,Google fighting buying and selling pageviews, etc.

To me the user data thing has some merit but it’s very hard to determine what level of satisfaction the user actaully gets from a given site. Just becasue you only go to a site once does not mean it is not a great resource – so many variables to consider with user data and then there is the possibility that this could also be manipulated. I think Google has it right to some extent, the aging factor is a great weapon against spam but then you might lose out on current events and hot new sites. No matter what there is always going to be manipulation and it’s just a case of working out what type of manipulation they can control the best and I suspect we might be stuck with links for a while….

“User Data ! that’s the key here in fact it always has been”
Wouldn’t this be just as easy to game as links? Someone mentioned some techniques over at SEOmoz…
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-dave-naylor-in-three-acts

I agree that it’s impossible for Google to eradicate link buying, all they’re capable of doing is penalising some overt networks and hoping to scare webmasters into dropping any link buying tactics.

I can see two problems with moving to user data from sites like Feedburner and Youtube. Firstly there are still a huge proportion of sites – largely ecommerce that still don’t interact with social media – don’t have RSS feeds or submit to social news sites. These sites aren’t always bad, but they’re being placed at a disadvantage.

Secondly it’s arguable that it’s even easier to buy Stumbles, Diggs, RSS subscribers than it is to buy links. Armies of Chinese workers sitting at their terminals will be able to swamp social news sites and ‘fake’ data a lot more easily than it is to get a link from the BBC or CNN.

Personally I just can’t see links being dropped as a metric. Yes it’s easy to fake low quality link profiles, but much harder to obtain links from genuine sources – certainly not on a large scale. I can see authority and age becoming more of a factor and an increase in manual penalties, but I just don’t see Google having any other option.

Interesting, every time a spammer comes up with a new method, big companies like Google have to find a way to push them out. This is good for those of us running legitimate means of marketing, but as for the spammers, Google is getting so monstrous they stamp out spam techniques almost before they become relevant. Good post D!

There are so many factors Google can take into consideration it just isn’t funny. Aside from Feedburner and youTube, they have their bookmarking services, “note this”, traffic via gmail, stats via Analytics, CTR in adwords and through double click. They have so many different areas they could analyse for intent and influence that they could further reduce the reliance on link data.

Furthermore they could buy (or create a new) hitwise for traffic monitoring, as well as properly index social bookmarking sites.

Just think, many years ago when they started some people questioned their ability to index and rank using link data as the information was seen as just to large to deal with. Their ability to take further disparate sources & deduce relevancy is probably already here. Being put into use on the SERPs can’t be too far away.

From strange bumps in the results that occur from time to time in different niches, we all know that Google play with the results, could they be testing with their other data sources already? How to monitor what areas of influence they are using and how to improve things for our sites and clients is the next challenge for SEO.

I assume out of all factors Google could take into account, external linking is the most difficult to manipulate…

Dave,

G has mote till it will get there. And the user data that they have NOW is influenced by the SERPS. Some sites are made to retain the attention small, some retain more attention.. depends on the niche.

I don’t think G will be able to do this soon. Theu can only use the user behavioral data along with other data, just another factor.

If they will concentrate just on user data what new websites will do?

The links are the foundation of the web and I don’t think this will change pretty soon.

PS. user behavior can be faked too; proxys, navigational software and so on…

This is interesting experiment from Google:
http://www.google.com/experimental/a840e102.html

It wouldn’t be a big step to move from this being used on individual results to them noticing that the x% of people like or dislike a site and amend the SERPs accordingly.

Perhaps they’ve been looking at http://www.aftervote.com Dave?

User data would be uselful for stickiness of a site as one of the factors, heh then some pron sites should do well but then again that only measures if a site is worthy of people looking at it. It does not determine anchor and which site should rank for what.

Its all well and good, google wanting to index the entire world, but if I’m looking for a loan, I do not want to read articles on loans, wikipedia pages on the history or loans, why your mum needed a loan to get the car fixed, or which bank is buying which bank, i want an application form for a loan. at this rate, if google only wants to supply quality information, they are going to lose business searchers, which, in my opinion is probably 75%+ of all searchers.

Another move by the ‘G’ to force business advertisers to use ppc

Great story, but I think Google will have a very hard time to index the results without links. They are going to try a knew thing where they let people vote for results, but I don’t think that this is going to work.

Buying Links what if

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