Wayfire Media

Following Matt Cutts' recent announcement that Google will allow users to report paid links, Andy Beard has taken the bold step of submitting his own content to Google's webspam team, in the hope of getting some official statement out of Google. I certainly hope he gets a response, but it seems unlikely.

The disturbing truth is that the only noise out of Google about paid links comes from Matt Cutts' "personal" blog postings. And Matt's stance on the need for machine-readable disclosure of paid links seems to contradict everything Google has ever said about building sites for people, rather than for search engines.

There's obviously a considerable gray area regarding what constitutes a paid link, and Andy's post does a good job of listing many cases where a link may be motivated (directly or indirectly) by financial gain. If Google is serious about identifying and penalizing "paid links," and would prefer that webmasters avoid them, it would seem that the obvious first step is define what constitutes a "paid link." But rather than offering such a definition, or at least some clear guidelines, Google seems content to remain silent while Matt drops hints and spreads FUD.

It's also very troubling that, while no precise definition has been offered, the only "paid links" Matt seems to be concerned about are the cheap ones. Buying links for a few hundred dollars (through TextLinkAds, PayPerPost, ReviewMe, etc) is bad. But links gained through multi-million dollar corporate partnerships are okay.

Currently there's a live link to Google at the bottom of every page of Adobe.com. Are we to believe that this is simply an editorial endorsement of Google by Adobe, and that it has nothing to with the partnership between the two companies? That would be an odd coincidence, since Google's ubiquitous presence on Adobe.com began in in May of 2006, just a month before the announcement of an agreement to distribute Google's toolbar with Adobe software (terms of the deal were undisclosed).

Maybe trading links for financial compensation is okay if it part of some larger business dealing? What about a more clear cut case? Andy says:

Companies are allowed to buy links from the Yahoo directory, which is well known to confer a large amount of trust to a domain, and has been propping up Google's algorithms for years. Will we soon see Google state that the Yahoo directory should be made nofollow for all paid inclusions? Matt Cutts has previously stated that the Yahoo directory is OK because there is editorial review.

So it's alright for Yahoo to sell links because of their "editorial review." Certainly the paid reviews that Andy submitted to the webspam team required much more editorial review than the Yahoo directory can afford to give to the many sites it receives, so if Google's stance on the value of "editorial review" is consistent, Andy should be in the clear.

But then, Matt Cutts doesn't speak for Google, according to his blog's disclaimer, so we're left to wonder about Google's official stance on "paid links." Hopefully, some day soon they'll tell us plainly, rather than making us read between the lines of their employee's personal blog. Is that too much to ask from the company that pledged to "Do No Evil?"

I just happened across a post by Matt Jones, who's asking if Article Marketing is a Waste of Time. Matt submitted 20 articles to a couple of popular article directories and was less than impressed with the results (2 incoming links from low trust sites). Submitting to free article sites is one of the most commonly mentioned ways of building links and traffic for your web site, and I've even heard it touted as a means of search engine optimization. I think it's a complete waste of time.

Who Republishes Articles?

Think about the type of links you're going to get by submitting to article directories. Do any of the reputable sites you read post this type of content? The reality is that sites republishing free articles are generally of very low quality. Sites that regularly publish quality, original content aren't going to water down their pages with this sort of duplicate content. Instead, your article is going to end up on Made for Adsense sites with a lot of other republished content. Those aren't the links you want, and they're unlikely to drive much traffic either.

If you must submit to article directories, make sure you're writing new content to submit, and don't publish those same articles on your own site. At least that way you won't be hurting yourself with duplicate content. But if you're going to go through the trouble to write fresh content, there are better uses for those articles that can garner links from quality sites. Like most things worth doing, though, it does require a bit of work.

An Alternative - Guest Blogging

Instead of writing up your article for the free directories, consider writing it for a particular site as a guest author.

Find a few blogs that write on similar topics and contact the authors. Let them know that you're trying to get more exposure for your blog and you'd like to write an article for their site. You'll find many authors who are open to the idea if you make it clear that you're going to provide them with a quality article, meaning:

• Provide original content that will be published only on their blog (nothing you're going to publish yourself or submit to directories).
• Your writing should meet the site's editorial standards. Think of this like an audition, and a chance to attract new readers. Make it some of your best work.
• Solicit feedback on the article's topic. Be flexible (within reason).
• Show some links to your best blog posts to demonstrate that you can write a good post. Once you've done this a few times, show links to the other site's where you've written guest posts.
• No blatant self-promotion. No affiliate links.

Publishing on other blogs in this fashion is definitely more work. You have to write an original, quality article for each site, and you have to do the legwork to set up these guest blogging opportunities. The payoff, though, is that you can obtain quality links from trusted web sites. If you enjoy writing articles and want to be read by a wider audience, all while building quality links, you might find this method well worth the effort.

UPDATE:  In the comments, niche marketing blogger Andy Beard recommended the Article Marketer service as a viable method for article distribution. They even have a free service available, so if you're interested in trying your hand at article marketing, it's worth a try.

Aside from the obvious privacy angle on AOL's recent release of the search records from 650,000 of its customers, some interesting data has begun to surface from those brave souls willing to sift through the 17+ million searches.

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article today detailing some of the trends found in that data.  Among the most interesting points:

• The top ten words searched for were:
  1. free
  2. new
  3. lyrics
  4. county
  5. school
  6. city
  7. home
  8. state
  9. pictures
  10. music
• In 47% of all searches, users did not click on any of the links presented to them
• When users did click on a search result, they choose the first site listed 42% of the time

When considering this data, it's important to keep in mind that it contains only the search records of AOL users, so this shouldn't be expected to represent the search habits of more technically adept users. It does give some insights into the search behavior of a great many users, though, and it's worth paying attention to. 

Most notable is the importance of ranking in the number one spot for a given search term. With 42% of clicks going to the top result, it's obvious that there's a huge difference in traffic between simply being on the first page of results and gaining that number one spot. The number 10 listing might still get decent traffic for a common search phrase, but for less common niches number one is the only place to be.