Good points. I'd like to know who's been saying this: "The word is being passed around of possible new Google system checks for advertiser/sponsor links. It is being said that Google is looking for keywords on websites related to the selling of text ads. " I have never seen that , or anything like it, posted in any forum or on any industry resource. Maybe they meant to say: "The word is being passed around our office by me of possible new Google system checks for advertiser/sponsor links. It is being said by me and person sitting next to me that Google is looking for keywords on websites related to the selling of text ads. "
Ouch. Now bear in mind I didnt buy into it 100%, but I must admit I did get a bit edgy. Google has surprised me on many occasions so when a company like LW sends something like this out I pay attention. Hopefully they cannot provide any solid backing.
The email is probably BS, BUT. I have to agree with the thought behind it. Google have at the heart of their algo, links= a vote for the site! Advertising is there to get you business and product awareness. If I were Google, then I would discount ALL links from the footer area of a page, as they are likely to be traded links and unimportant. Unless they are internal links when they become a sitemap and are very important. Currently I am not aware they do this, although Matt Cutts did mention that in a meeting a while back. Trading links for the worth of a backlink is gaming the algo, and we can argue as much as we like, it is a fact! The ONLY real link to your site is one that is not requested, or is the result of an email making them aware of your product or service. Links on a theme have some relevance, even if they are reciprocated, but the bulk, probably 90%+ are spam links, put in place solely for the benefit of the search engine algos. I am not saying it is wrong, I am just telling it like I see it (in fact I am as guilty as the next man as I get links for clients). If sponsored links are advertising (which they should be) answer me this question. Would you still go on link hunts if there was no benefit to your search engine ranking? Google will never penalise a site for links to it (unless it brings in a watertight way of checking up on crosslinking, ownership of domain, IP etc). What Google WILL do is to negate the value of links it considers to be paid or traded links (un natural links). That said, does anyone remember Search King .
Absolutely! What I want when I buy advertising is to get a nice amount of targeted visitors to my site
Well said, and that is my theory as well. Link for traffic, and you get traffic. Too many people are worried about page rank etc when chasing links. Funny thing is, when I am browsing or looking for information to buy, or actually to buy a product, I never look at the page rank of the page I am viewing. It is a sad thing that we have to chase links for relevance (as is proper business practice) and links for links sake
yes, direct traffic is priority one with search related benefits being a close second at this point in time....at least for me.
These replies are making an old bald Welsh bloke happy in fatc they are restoring my faith in webmarketers
Ok, after sending them an email telling them that their theory was just ridiculous, here is their response... Oh, boy... don't feel like getting into a discussion since they clearly have no idea of what SEO and advertising mean.
Here is where I have a problem with all of this. In html code not all footers and sidebars are in the bottom of the html code. With CSS and DIV tags you can structure pages in all sorts of ways. I guess the Google algo is now a mind reader as well. So what I purchased a sponsored link, how can they tell what my intentions are PR, traffic or both. They certainly have no problem accepting our dollars for adwords. Natural search equals sales, sales equal ad dollars. Case in point, when Yahoo started screwing with there algo in Jan and MSN split off on their own, my sites fell deep in the SERPs for a while (still not fully recovered). I was then forced to cut my ad budget by 40% for both Overture and Adwords because I could no longer afford their overpriced keywords. At that time I was paying out nearly 70% of what I brought in sales out in advertising. The natural search ranking helped to balance me out around 40%. So I was forced to cut back when I dropped in the SERPs to maintain a decent profit margin.
You have made a classic assumption here that a search engine should give a damn what your intention is. The way I see it is to liken website marketing practices and search engine algorithms to tuna fishing. If there is a practice such as footer link buying that is skewing the serps beyond that which is acceptable to the search engine owners, then the search engines will take actions to correct this. They will put in place a trawl, and remove the link value of all these footer links. (I am NOT saying they are or will do this, I am just using this as an example of the principle). So they look at all the footer links across a site and remove value from them. To answer your question about footer links not being at the end of the code, have a look at this Block level link analysis paper. http://research.microsoft.com/research/pubs/view.aspx?tr_id=754 . So what we now have is a search engine taking action via a trawl much the same as tuna fishers trawl for tuna, to remove something that they think is skewing relevance of their SERP's. Ok so you are a dolphin, that just happened to be there with links in the footer of truly relevant pages that are perfectly matched to yours, but you have bought the links, so they do not appear in the body copy they appear in a block of links somewhere on the page. WHOOSH your dolphin has just been caught in the tuna net, for no other reason than you happened to be swimming near the tuna. As I said above, I am not saying this is happening now, or is going to happen in the future, but for relevance to remain as more and more pages are added to the index, then something needs to be done to correct unnatural linking practices. Anyone who has bought printed advertising will tell you that the best places are the ears of a newspaper (The little spots at the top of the masthead on the front page) The front or back page, top right hand of page 3 or 5, then a right hand page and preferably a corner spot. WHY? Because these are the positions that get you the most response. If someone was to buy advertising in my paper, and all they got was a few word at the foot of the page, mixed in with other words for other advertisiers, they would NOT be happy. This is why I say with conviction that it is a matter of time before action is taken over footer links. Google is an advertising company and they know full well that the position on a page is key to response. The perfect position for an advert to gt response is probably smack bang in the centre of the screen as that is normally where the eyes are positioned when a page loads. (Although they quickly fall into read mode and go to the image, then the header top left then the across the page reading left to right, then the sub header, then the body copy. (assuming we are talking about marketing to the Western world where that is how books are read of course). Hope I have explained my reasons for saying what I have said better now. My final word on footer links is this though... Make hay while the sun shines as I and everyone else certainly is