Wisdom of Google Cracking Down on Paid Links the Way It Did - Part I
The past few weeks were pretty hard on many webmasters. As Google put its threats to execution, many of us saw our PR decrease on some of our sites either due to those sites selling links or those sites being linked to sites that are selling links. As the Web is a big network, a penalty imposed on one site will have a ricochet impact on other sites linked to that one and so forth. The magnitude of that impact depends on how close the sites are to one another. Think of it as an earthquake. The site being penalized is the center of the earthquake and sites linked directly to that site are at close proximity… you get the picture. So, if we adopt the above comparison, the most recent PR update by Google translated into a multitude of earthquakes all over the Web. This is indeed a major event and online discussions on this issue is a good indicator of its magnitude.
The way Google dealt with the issue of link sales is troubling however in many respects. It penalized link sellers as well as link buyers. I believe this is a mistake. Search engines’ main focus should be to retrieve accurate results when people do searches online. The fact that a website is selling links in no way prejudices its relevancy or the relevancy of its content. In fact, it’s the opposite. If people are buying links on those sites, oftentimes, it’s because those sites offer something good (we are not talking about junk sites here). Penalizing sites that sell links will have the impact of lowering their rankings in search engine results based on factors totally unrelated to relevancy. BIG MISTAKE. This is a sign that Google has lost its focus… the thing that brought it to the forefront on the Web in the first place.
The thing that Google should have done is limit itself to penalizing sites that are buying links. This makes sense because those sites don’t deserve those links in the first place and whatever benefits their derived from those paid links are just artificial. Had Google taken a stronger stance on only penalizing sites buying links, but penalizing them strongly, many webmasters who buy links would have stopped. This would have been the better solution as it would truly have improved search results in Google.
On a last note, the stance taken by Google is very harsh because many sites’ main source of revenue is link selling. To ask those sites to no longer sell links is like to tell them to declare bankruptcy. This is just not realistic.