Have I been captured by enemy blackhats? Tortured and thrown to the dogs? Or just relentlessly interviewed over email (and in person)? Well, since the first two sound painful, let’s go with door number three.
- First off is an interview on social media marketing, with a few nifty spoilers that I leaked for anyone who’s interested.
- Next, we’ve got a bit of a more personal and industry focused interview and again I tried to toss out a bit of new information about what we’re up to here at mozquarters (yes, I’m cheesily coining that term).
- I think I actualy forgot to link to this interview on mobile search (a topic about which I still have plenty to learn).
- Finally, there’s this fancy video interview with myself and Michael Gray (conducted by one of my favorite people, Michael McDonald), wherein we try to solve the paid links debate, but come to no particular conclusions. Watch out, though, it’s 18 minutes long (yeah, that’s how into paid link debates we are).
Let me just make a few quick points to wrap up on the paid links issue:
- If Google could reach every publisher, every marketer and every webmaster with their pitch on paid links, they could legitimately request that everyone who buys and sells links does so using “nofollow”
- However, as it stands, I’d guess that less than 10% of the demographic that needs to know about paid links and “nofollow” has heard about it (and probably only 50% even know what nofollow is).
- As such, if the 10% who know (us) go around using nofollow, we’re basically hampering our own ranking efforts and helping our less-informed competition outperform us. That seems pretty ridiculous.
- And, from a Google engineering standpoint, trying to detect paid links is still going to be a major part of what the search quality team does, and the 10% of us who obey the rules aren’t going to make one ounce of impact on what they have to do, which is to algorithmically scale paid link detection and devaluing.
- Thus, if I were Matt Cutts, this is what I’d say publicly about the issue:
Paid links, in Google’s opinion, pollute the search results. The people on the search quality team are spending a lot of time and brainpower fighting back by detecting and devaluing paid links. Thus, if you’re a webmaster, we’d urge you not to buy links for the perceived value that you think they might provide in helping to rank your site better. We’ve got a ton of very smart people cutting off the flow of link juice from those links and you’re going to be wasting your money. If you want to buy links for traffic or branding or other marketing purposes, that’s great, but be aware that we’re not going to count them in our rankings.
If you can’t get enough of the paid links stuff, I’d check out Michael Gray’s slides from the paid links presentation.
BTW – I’m still waiting on official word about a bunch of other issues from the conference in general and from Google in particular, before I can blog about them. Hopefully that dispensation will arrive in the next few days.
