fatinfo.com

If you read Matt Cutts‘ recent post on search manipulation “selling links with pagerank”, you will get a sense that search engines are losing the battle or extending too much resources to fight paid links. Search engines are all of a sudden educating the easily swayed and impressionable surfers that the 4 static page brainturmortreatment.org website on gamma knives and radiosurgery should not be trusted because its natural search rankings may have been positively effected by paid links / reviews. Why is it necessary to state the obvious that it is a POS site to begin with, where any twelve year old would not rely on the website for brain tumor research.

On a positive note, begging for websites to enable “the no follow attribure or some other mechanism so that search engines aren’t affected” shows advertisers with lots of quality paid links are winning the natural search battle against search engine algorithms.

It is also perfectly safe to provide links for advertisers who sell retail products like golfballs as Gray Wolf brings up a solid point about Google’s checkout blog deeplinking their Google cart enabled retailers to the top of the search engine results. Read the paid review here. (Google takes a percentage from the golf retailer for every transaction processed by the Google checkout cart.)

These scare tactics released by search engines to unwitting webmasters and lemmings about paid links are losing ground as the smarter advertising community continue to embrace paid links for improving their natural ranking so they can spend less money on paid search marketing campaigns. Clearly advertisers realize the benefits of targeted keyword links outweigh any threat of penalization to buyers of paid links because if it did happen, firms can start eliminating all competitors by buying lots of sponsored links for the competition. Wouldn’t everyone want every high ranking competitors toppled if penalizing paid link advertisers were so easy.

Continue to buy good solid links if you are building your business for the next ten years. If you are not, then the competition is slowly building their foundation of paid back links while enjoying higher rankings across every search engine and leaving your company behind.