This is a guest post by dk. He is a friend of mine who throws killer events like his thinktank and his poker tournament during Pubcon. dk has advised and marketed for some of the largest companies on the internet such as Facebook, World Series of Poker, and BLAMAds.
Marc Hardgrove of BackLinks.com just stepped up and grabbed the Major sponsorship for my Poker Tournament, High Limit Room Meetup, and the site about this stuff, and as a result we have named the Poker Tournament this year during Pubcon, the Purpose Inc and BackLinks.com poker tournament.
So I decided tonight, in honor of Halloween and Marcs generosity, to put on my black cape and fangs, and see if I can make a good argument for purchased links.
Google has put me out as a poster child for white hat SEO, which is all I ever do, and it has made me very successful. Tonight, in honor of Halloween I am going to take a look from the dark castle of those who do paid linking. I personally have not bought a link since Matt Cutts busted me 4 years ago in front of over 2000 people for having bought thousands of links previously. I actually adore Matt Cutts, and am very grateful to Google and Matt for all of the amazing things they have delivered to me when I did things White Hat, but for tonight I am going to wear the cape that is black!
The hard truth is (in my opinion) the sites that do well in Google are getting links with the following characteristics:
- The site linking to your site should have as many links to it as possible.
- The site linking to your site should be of a similar topic to your site.
- The words in the link itself should be related to the topic of your site.
It can get a lot more complex than that, but I have found that 1 to 3 above will beat any other strategy if you simply get enough of them, and their quality is high.
The most obvious way to accomplish 1 to 3 is to pay someone to do it.
The downside to buying links is that Google tells you that you should not pay someone to link to you, and if Google finds out they will remove you from Google.
But is that fair?
Does Google have a legal or ethical right to tell you what to do?
Let’s look at this from the view of the dark castle.
For this discussion lets assume you never agreed to or signed anything with Google. To create a website and put it on the internet, you do not need Google, and in fact can do it without even having heard of Google.
Once your site is up, Google has a robot that cruises the internet looking for new pages.
The robot follows a link to your site, and then follows the links in your site and copies all of your material, each and every word and image it can find. Now every word on your site probably is covered by copyright. Did you ever give permission to Google to copy every word on your site? I think probably not.
Now regardless of the legality of whether Google can do that without violating copyright laws, just as a matter of politeness, did they ever ask your permission to copy and use every single word you ever wrote on your site?
It is the only instance I know of in the world where someone regularly comes onto your property, and copies down every single word of anything and then leaves with it. Then comes back every few days and does that same thing. Anywhere else in the world this would be considered somewhere between rude and a felony.
See if I take a photo from National Geographic’s website and use it on my site, they can sue me for copyright infringement. If I go to Google and look at the bottom of most pages, you will see a © 2010 Google. That basically means they are telling you that you can not copy the content of their pages and use it, or you will be subjected to copyright laws! LOL
Now if you go right now and Google the single word Roseanna, and look at the pictures, you will see a picture of a pretty girl, wearing sun glasses, and eating an ice cream. I took that picture, and now Google puts it on their site every day, and shows pretty Roseanna to the world but they never asked me first, and they definitely never asked Roseanna.
Some might say that based on that, all bets are off.
So now Google has all of the content from your site, they copied all of the links going into and out of your site, and they are going to present this content and links on their site, which is Google.com
Remember, Google.com is simply another website, made up mostly of content taken from yours and other peoples websites, usually without asking permission first or being given permission.
So, now we are dealing with another website (Google.com) that has taken all of our content from us without asking, and is going to give bits and pieces of it to other users when they come to search for things.
Oh, and by the way, now that they have attracted users to their site with the content they took from yours and others websites, they are going to sell ads on those pages to other people, and make hundreds of millions of dollars off of this.
And each of those ads on Google that go to other sites, why they are links, paid links, purchased by the recipient from Google.
Unless I understand something incorrectly, the major income source for Google is the paid ads you see when you search at Google.com which are paid links.
Google has come out with a list of guidelines they want Webmasters to follow. The guidelines clearly state Google does not want you to do paid links. In fact they have a technical method they request of you, that requires programming skills, if you do link to someone else to let them know it is a paid link.
Now because Google can make someone a millionaire almost overnight a lot of people want to please them, so many people follow Googles rules voluntarily.
I have noticed some people confuse Googles rules, with actual law that you can go to jail for. So far, Google has not taken control of the country, the state or the city I live in, so until they do, Googles rules are to me simply what they want, but nothing most of you have ever agreed to.
If you go by 1 to 3 that I wrote above, the simplest way to get more good quality links, and to do well in Google is to buy links. (By the way, don’t send me an e-mail asking to buy links from me because I will just forward it to Matt Cutts who is in charge of Googles Search Spam and a valued friend LOL). That is what Marcs company BackLinks.com has as its goal, to sell high quality links at wholesale prices that are lower than his competitors.
Can Google then decide not to include you in their index at that point? Sure they can. But from what I hear from Marc and others, even some Fortune 500 companies continuously buy links to maintain their good positions in Google.
Links of course carry other value besides getting Google to think highly of your site. That is why Adwords, Adsense and Facebook ads are so popular, and each and every one of them are paid links. Paid links from quality sites deliver very, very targeted traffic to your site. If I could buy a permanent link from John Chow’s site to my internet business sites it would be worth it to me, just for the quality traffic.
If you have more questions on paid links, feel free to hit up Marc at the Poker Tournament on November 9th at 8pm at the Mirage. Marc is a cool guy and I like him.
Marc also is a total baller. In the year that most companies have scaled back on promotional spending, Marc stepped up when I asked him to give a nice lump of money to allow the tournaments and my other activities this November to be first class.
If you want to be a guest and get free drinks courtesy of Marc and BackLinks.com or a be a player, go to purposeincpoker.com and signup.
When the sun comes back up tomorrow I will wear my white cape again, and be a Google Matt Cutts fanboy (called a Cutlet) but tonight I wear the cape that is black!
Much Blood,
dk