One thing that have bothered me for some time is how Google treat websites that buy and/or sell links. Not that I am a fan of buying or selling links; I’m proud to say I’ve never done either. But I cannot understand why Google chases black-hat link-builders, when they could make the algorithm take care of most of the link-building problem themselves.
I studied cybernetics at the university for five years, before I started working with SEO. For those who are not familiar with this part of the engineering field, all-mighty Wikipedia describes it as:
Cybernetics is the interdisciplinary study of the structure of regulatory systems. Cybernetics is closely related to control theory and systems theory. Both in its origins and in its evolution in the second half of the 20th century, cybernetics is equally applicable to physical and social (that is, language-based) systems.
This means that I spent my time learning about control systems, feedback loops, chaos theory, robust control theory and how to control all kinds of different systems — from computers, helicopters, elevators, to calculating change in population when one breed eats the other, and the other only eats carrots. Who will get exterminated, and at what speed? We also studied different types of ranking algorithms but sadly enough Google, or search engine algorithms in general, was not in the curriculum when I was a student.
Nevertheless, my background leaves me with an interest for the Google algorithms a bit above the average Norwegian.
Fact 1
Google doesn’t want you to buy links for better rankings. They tell you to get all your incoming paid links with the cute little rel=nofollow-tag, which theoretically makes the link itself worthless in terms of better rankings for your site.
Fact 2
The market of selling and buying links just to get better rankings in Google is huge, even though it violates the Google guidelines, and Google penalizes websites that are caught doing so.
A suggestion to Google
Working with Google Algorithms is like working with black boxes. You put something in and you get something out. Then you guess, from the output, what’s inside the black box.
I, and probably all the readers of this blog post, would be surprised if Google suddenly stated that there is nothing in the Page Rank algorithm that penalizes websites with (too) many external followed links to other sites. Most SEO experts will tell their clients to keep the number of followed links to other sites as low as possible. I’ve seen examples where big Norwegian sites have lost two PR-points when updated, and we couldn’t find any other reason for this, other than the huge amount of followed links they (probably) had sold.
Why not make this a bigger part of the algorithm? More weighting on followed outgoing links. I’m not gonna try to give exact numbers, but let’s say a website are only allowed to have a total of 30 outgoing followed links, and not more than one for each page. If you cross these limitations, you’ll loose Page Rank.
Consequences
It would instantly kill all value from link farms. When a website sells links, the value is determined by the PR of the site selling links. If a site that sells links, get major drops in PR, their followed links are of less value for the buyer. And what happens if you pay $10,000 for a link, just to see two weeks later that the site you bought it from drops from PR 8 to PR 4? Well, tough luck. You tried a shortcut and got lost at the black painted trail in the SEO Forest. This would make link-buyers extremely skeptical for mainly two reasons:
- You don’t know how many more links the site are selling.
- You actually don’t see their current Page Rank at all time, just the last public update.
“Pump and dump” in stock markets have been around for a while. The same will happen with sites selling links. But this will only penalize the sites buying links, in terms of them throwing money out the window, hereby making the buying-link game more or less worthless.
What if you don’t sell links, but need to link to many other sites? You will be forced to use the rel=nofollow-tag, which will keep you from getting penalized in search.
The consequences described above is classical control system theory. A kind of feedback-loop which regulates itself by monitoring the number of followed links going out of websites.
And what if you get a guarantee from a PR 9 site that they will only sell one link from their front page, and it is to your site? Then you probably have to pay a lot of money for it (not to forget the sleepless nights as you can never be sure they won’t sell more links). The equivalent in Google AdWords could be the maximum bid for a search phrase. This is how much this search phrase link means to you. Well, go ahead and by it then.
The point of my suggestion is not to get rid of the market of buying and selling links. But it might limit it to a really small part of search engine optimization. Google won’t have to spend time chasing paid links. You don’t have to worry if your banner at the website of the soccer team you are sponsoring are going to get you penalized in Google. I see mostly benefits. We are more or less trusting the world financial markets to be a robust control system. Why not let the algorithm handle buying or selling links itself? Do you SEO experts see any major drawbacks to this approach?
