Google Inside

Old school Link spamming building is dead. You can no longer simply put up completely irrelevant links and hope you get link love for them.

As illustrated in the comic above (which is thanks to Monty Python and the Holy Grail [one of my favorite movies]), we can see how traditional old school link building is dead.

The old style of link building was “Hey! You have a PageRank 8 site, that must mean it’s [uber] trusted by all the search engines! I’ll give you $100 if you put my link there. K? thx!” That is no longer the case. Search engines have been smarter and better.

But from what I can tell, a lot of people are still stuck in the 90s and think that irrelevant linking still works. Let’s take a look at what I’m talking about.

This is just one example I’ve seen around the web. I have seen it numerous times where the links are entirely irrelevant to the site content.

This article is exactly related to the paid links industry and attacks that are happening right now. This makes me question, does Google want to scare or attack the industry because of all the irrelevant linking that is going on or is it because they want to “naturalize” their index?

A Little Google Background on AdWords

10 years ago, Google didn’t have near the computing power or algorithm power it does today. 5 years ago [2002], we were remembering 9/11, we were talking about Anna Nicole Smith and her popularity, and Amazon.com was the #1 top retailer. Were we talking about the paid link industry or even thinking about it? Certainly not. Was Google generating significant revenue through AdWords and AdSense? Certainly.

So what’s different about today and 5 years ago? Google’s obsession to control the spending market.

Google is afraid that if companies move to a pure SEO methodology, it will draw away from their AdWords revenue that is making up a large portion of their entire gross profit. Google reported $4.23 billion for Q3 of 2007, which is a growth of $1.54 billion from Q3 of 2006.

Google is scared of losing that revenue through SEO methods. In reality, Google should not be fighting this at all. Any good SEO knows that moving to a pure SEO method is not the best method of driving traffic to your business. It’s a combination effort of both SEO and PPC. An SEO that moves completely away from PPC has no idea what they’re doing.

Back to Being Relatively Relevant

I completely stand behind Google on wanting to de-value irrelevant links, sure, that only makes sense. But attacking the entire industry of paid links, now that’s just stupid.