Measuring the quality of an ad system
Many bloggers and other website owners around the world aren’t selling their content these days, they’re financing their site with advertising. Almost every ad system seems to be a compromise. You can measure this compromise across different parameters: is the ad relevant? Is it unobtrusive? Is it disclosed? Is the product or service advertised fair to users? Is the ad directly influencing search engine rankings? Is the ad creating a conflict of interest? Is the ad obfuscating the voice of the website owner?
As an example, let’s look at Google AdSense ads by analyzing these parameters. AdSense come in various flavors, so we’ll pick the AdSense image ad type. This type of ad is sometimes relevant, but not always; Google’s technology aims to deliver an ad that somehow matches the content of the page it’s own, but they’re not always successful. It is sometimes obtrusive – because it allows for animations – though this also depends on the placement on the page. It is always disclosed, by the way Google serves the ad (ignoring some rare bugs that appeared in the past). Whether or not the advertised site is fair to consumers depends on the type of ad (Google does some monitoring of their ads, but there’s a lot of weird stuff in their program as well). This type of ad is not directly influencing search engine rankings, because of the way it’s delivered (using a combination of JavaScript and inline frames). The conflict of interest for the website owner is very low, because many ads are rotated, and there is no manual approval mechanism. This type of ad also doesn’t require you to “lend your voice” to the ad – an advertorial, which starts with e.g. “This site recommends the following product ...” – thus it will not obfuscate your voice, unless it’s placed in such a way that people will confuse it with your content.
Whether or not this ad type is acceptable to the blogger thus depends on a variety of factors which need to be balanced. Maybe the website owner will decide that the ad is relevant enough most of the time, or that the animations are so rare they don’t particularly mind. Pragmatically speaking, the higher the payout for the website maker, the higher (on average) the chance they’ll go along with a bigger compromise. If you’re a webmaster who doesn’t accept popup advertising, for instance, ask yourself; would you allow popups on your site for 1 hour only (ever) with a payout of, say, $100,000? If you answered “yes”, then you can see how the payment influences your judgment of what is acceptable.
Let’s take the example of a classical paid link, because the topic caught some additional heat lately when Google employee A PageRank 8 text link on an undisclosed “Home Page of IRC Chat Log Website” is being auctioned by LinkAdage.com. The bid starts at $190/ month.
Indeed, a paid link on a trusted site reading “Buy Sailing Boat” has the potential to push the advertised site into top rankings when you search for buy sailing boat. But many search engine makers consider this an unnatural way to rank pages, because their approach tries to work on site relevancy, not site advertising budget. Google in the past already heavily punished those websites which gained too many site-wide backlinks, with too similar wordings. Buy-Text-Links.biz on their site explain: “Text link buyers used to prefer site-wide text links, several or dozens of links throughout a site. The Search Engines no longer consider this an effective strategy. Text links on every page in a site appears contrived, rather than natural.” They add that one should make it a point “to vary the anchor text on the sites, which looks more natural.”
Some text link brokers also keep the sites that sell paid links secret in order to prevent punishment from Google and others. TextLinkBrokers.com on their website say “we understand that it is important to keep our inventory confidential. This is essential in order to prevent the search engines from penalizing our inventory partners from passing link popularity to our clients.”
A link from a PageRank 9 “Authority Computer Resource” homepage is said to have been sold for $599/ month. The broker is Buy-Text-Links.biz.
Enter “nofollow”
The battle between text link brokers and search engines could thus be described as this: text link ad sellers try to make the paid links look as natural and unpaid as possible, while search engines try their best to find unnatural link structures. A search engine maker can look at block structures of a website, for example, and lower the value of links which appear to stem from footer or sidebar areas, though this is by no means trivial. Another approach, recently emphasized by Google’s head of webspam team Matt Cutts, is for webmasters to include what Matt calls a “machine-readable disclosure” of such paid links (my emphasis):
[T]his seems like a pretty good opportunity to talk about a simple litmus test for paid links and how to tell if a paid link violates search engines’ quality guidelines. If you want to sell a link, you should at least provide machine-readable disclosure for paid links by making your link in a way that doesn’t affect search engines. There’s a ton of ways to do that. For example, you could make a paid link go through a redirect where the redirect url is robot’ed out using robots.txt. You could also use the rel=nofollow attribute.
The “nofollow" value for links was
But not everyone agrees it’s up to webmasters to help Google figure out how to rank websites. Romanian search blogger
UK Google expert
One of the people I’ve talked to is 23-year old
Emil, who makes about $450 per months from these paid links, says one thing he likes about text link advertising is that the ads are unobtrusive, and that his users “don’t get their face full of ads.” He’s considering AdSense, but finds that this would require a different layout than his current one because it’s dependent on user clicks. Emil says he’s heard about the “nofollow” attribute being suggested for paid links and doesn’t think it’s a good solution. “People buy links from me because it gets them a [search engine]-boost, not because of the traffic it gives them (which seems to be the only linkbuying Google is OK with).” Emil adds that he finds it “mighty disturbing” that Google seems to try to shut down ad schemes other than AdSense. Asked whether he believes his paid links game search engines, Emil answers, “Some links do, some links don’t. What’s important is whether they are relevant or not, not if someone paid for them...” He outlines the compromise he’s struck: “Currently I have 9 spots that I let advertisers fill, and as soon as a more relevant site shows up I remove an irrelevant from the list (...) Relevancy is better for both me and the advertiser.” Emil says his approach is in some ways imperfect, arguing that being true to your users and making money from your site are “in many cases contradictory.” I asked Emil about the way he discloses (or doesn’t disclose) his paid links. Emil tells me this was another compromise he made. “I did use the phrase ’advertisement’ as the header initially, but after an advertiser complained I decided to go with something generic like ’elsewhere’. It’s better than ’recommended’, that the advertiser asked for, I think.” During Emil’s communication with this particular advertiser, who represented a search engine optimization firm, Emil says he was offered to replace all of his links by links paid from this firm – provided he changes some things with the way he presents the ads on the page. “The first thing was to remove the word advertising above the links. I started asking him why and got the explanation that my whole site would be banned from [Google] and stop forwarding [PageRank] altogether if I didn’t do it.” The SEO firm representative claimed to have had this knowledge from a private email exchange with a Google engineer. “He explained how each page was manually examined by a Google Quality Engineer and how important it was that I wholeheartedly recommended his site in my own words.” While Emil finally ended the relationship with this particular advertiser (“I obviously said no to his nonsense, and probably hurt his feelings, because he withdrew his link from the site at the end of the month”), this does bring up an important issue: adding a human-readable disclosure to your paid links increases the chance Google finds out about it, which in turn might allow them to devalue the links. In that case, the advertiser would not get what they paid the text link broker for – improved search engine rankings. The penalties that someone who buys links en masse can expect are known for years; their site might get banned or heavily down-ranked in Google for over-optimization. Hence text link brokers and those who advertise with them adjust their approaches in order to optimize, but not optimize too much. What can happen to those who sell paid links on their site, on the other hand, is a different story. One risk is rather obvious to search engine optimization experts: if you link to so-called “bad neighborhoods,” your own site will be down-ranked as well. But ever since Matt Cutts announced the spam report form for paid links, as an early experimental stage to collect data to try out algorithms, we have to ask ourselves if there’s more to it than the “bad neighborhood” risk. Back in 2005, Matt Cutts argued that he considers it outside of Google’s guidelines “to get PageRank via buying links,” adding that he would use “nofollow" for paid links meant to actually build buzz. On potential penalties, he
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Emil’s paid links section. (Emil told me he decided to remove the link “Paris Hotels” in the meantime.)What penalties can webmasters expect?
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