Paid Links: To Be Or Not To Be

18 Oct

Posted by YC as Google, Blogging, Make Money Online, Internet Marketing

Getting drawn into the paid links debate was an eye-opening experience. There were differing opinions from all sides. Some of them included:

Concentrate on blogging and providing quality content, not to be distracted by the issue
Questioning the ethics or fundamental ‘right or wrong’s of violating Google’s TOS and yet wanting their help and crying foul over their actions
Not to be oppressed by the seemingly growing dictatorship of an Internet juggernaut
We really have a choice at the end of the day

My main concern was a feeling that at the end of the day, despite selling links not to game the search engines, I would suffer the same penalties as those who do allow it. It was a ‘guilty till proven innocent‘ situation. I spent some time sitting on the fence and considered giving up selling links. Being in Google’s good books and in the hopes of getting a good PR eventually was the carrot.

A few days ago I had an interestingly enlightening exchange with a good friend. What followed was the realisation of what I am here for, on top of my making money online - to share what I learnt in my niche with my readers, which could possibly be solutions to their needs. What are some of these needs?

To know what they can use to make money online, Internet Marketing and blogging

There are many ways to achieve this, including and not limited to:

passing along what I learnt in the field
relating and informing what and how others have done to achieve similar goals
using my own real-life experiments and models

If you have read my About page, it’s clear that I am no expert (yet). And I am willing to give almost everything a try - you can’t really judge what works or not until you’ve tested it, in most instances. With paid links, if I were to go around saying they are evil because Google dislikes it, and not to engage in it at all, to me, it would be selling my readers short.

Paid links can make you money. Sure, it works much better for the big shots (they command a higher price), but it can work just as well for the smaller ones. Getting $15 a month for selling one link might not be worth getting penalised, but if you have not had much success with getting search engine traffic for certain sites in the first place, and you had 10 sites selling just one link each, that’s still $150 a month. Which is more than what most can make in a year with Adsense.

It’s all about finding the right balance and what works for you. And each site that you have. There are now so many ways one can make money online. Why can’t you leverage on them all? You might not be able to do it all within a single channel, but it shouldn’t stop you from expanding to other platforms. You can and do have a choice.

It isn’t a question about ethics either. If there is a demand for it and you can serve that, by all means go forth. Unless it hurts people in a way like drugs or violence does. And as long as you lay out the pros and cons, it contributes to creating awareness and no one should be penalised for that as well.

Consider too the saying not to put all your eggs in one basket. If you live by Google, be prepared to die by it anytime. Use them for your earning models which leverage on their services. But if you don’t explore other avenues, if Google disappears or their market share weakens (never say never), what will happen to your income? You might be banned from Adsense one fine day, without knowing why. And they rarely, if ever, reinstate those who fall by the wayside.

I will continue to share any method with my readers. Selling links on this site will still continue for now, as long as there are takers, and because I never concentrated on PR in the beginning anyway. I have no PR to sell! It’s undeniably great to have a high PR - brands my site better. It fetches a higher revenue commercially too. But in my personal opinion, the traffic a site is receiving now should really be the clincher. To me, that goes with good content. Buying a text link should be about attracting residual traffic from related sites that have large audiences. The bastard practise of doing so to boost your PR and search engine results flourished because of PR mechanics!

Finally, my opinion is this - if you make your living online, by virtue of the Internet being highly volatile, it is best that you continually explore what works for you. What doesn’t work with one revenue model might work on another. That shouldn’t stop you from adopting just one of them. If you dare not risk selling text links on your high PR site for fear of incurring a penalty, it doesn’t mean you can’t leverage on paid link revenue at all. You can build another site which can accommodate it. (Managing multiple sites would be for another day) If it contributes a significant percentage eventually, why wouldn’t you want to use it? Diversification is just as important on your journey to wealth creation.

5 Responses

rob

October 18th, 2007 at 8:09 pm
1

Reading this YC, you remind of something that we could all learn from. Be true to yourself and what feels right for you and your readers.

Whilst Google likes to talk in terms of its index and the rules ascribed to being in it, it cannot deny that it has become like a world utility too.

Would our electricity company tell us what appliances to use? Would it complain if we used the electricity to propel some energy saving device?

Theres a massive irony in all this. Websites are the fuel of a search engine. Without that fuel they cannot burn.

There was a time when they happy for all types of fuel. They didn’t care so long as they could burn it and make a little profit on it. Then they got a little more selective and decided to concede that certain types of fuel (spam) were unwelcome as they couldn’t burn them off without unwanted side effects. Recently they’ve upped that definition of pollutive fuels further with its whole paid links thing. Whatever next….
SEMSPot

October 19th, 2007 at 1:29 am
2

I believe paid links will be around for quite sometime. Yes Google might force some to go underground with there link selling operation and there will be new ways derived on how to hide a paid link on a page or site. In the end it is like what Rob mentioned above, the power company cannot tell us what appliances to use. However in the case with Google, since they are so big and to some sites a huge source of traffic they will still try and dictate what webmasters do in promoting of there site.
CHESSNOID

October 19th, 2007 at 1:46 am
3

Hi YC,
Excellent post. I think you describe really well what many of us readers have been feeling. Most of us are no where near the size to qualify for a page rank but we all aspire to have one. I think you covered all the issues at hand and provide great insight on prioritizing the money making aspect of blogs.

I agree with Rob in his observation. Sometimes a leader forgets its constituents.

Cheers!
ZHereford

October 19th, 2007 at 2:15 am
4

I find it odd that Google is so interfering in the case of link selling.
If a site is good but can’t get the exposure it deserves why not pay for the extra push? In the long run it helps everyone. The boys over at Google may need to re-think this one.
Thanks YC!
YC

October 21st, 2007 at 2:00 pm
5

@ Rob - If Google wants to dictate rules in their game, all power to them. But that doesn’t mean that outside their court, we have to play by the same rules. If I sell links on one of my sites, and they penalise THAT site within their search engine for not being within the laws of their game, then sure it is a choice I made. But if they penalise another site of mine that does not sell links, but by association it’s mine, then it would be another story. Thankfully I doubt they’d be silly enough to do so. There’re still many ways they can do to avoid handing out penalties, and if they’re interested in reducing logistics and overhead, they should seriously look into those.

@ SEMSpot - Thanks for commenting! The problem I see is that their measures do not solve the root cause of the issue - their coming up with a system like PR. Improve the algorithm, and you won’t have to waste your own resources reviewing and using FUD to breed an environment not conducive to improvement.

@ Chessnoid - Thanks! I think we know what is the best way to get around things - diversification. ;)

@ Z - They are focusing on the fact that sites buy links to leverage on the PR of others, and many of these sites do not provide quality content, thus affecting their search engine result quality. To me, I’d say do something about your algorithm or ditch the PR system and find some better more productive way, instead of fining others in a way that basically does more harm for the whole community instead of good.