Let the bargaining begin. It's a natural stage of mourning. As Google shuffles loose the paid links from its algorithms, SEOs are cycling past their initial denial, their outrage, and have begun negotiating. Stay tuned; depression and acceptance are likely to follow.
The Paid Link Stages Of Grief
On his blog this morning,
Instead of selling a link, Fishkin suggests selling reviews with links in them. In essence, webmasters are paying for the review, not the link. The reviewer is paid whether or not he or she posts something positive. The link is designated "nofollow" if the reviewer is not offering an endorsement, or the nofollow attribute is removed is the reviewer does offer endorsement.
"The marketplace has to exist," he writes, "and search engine have to fight against what they perceive to be manipulative, non-editorial votes. But, what if there was a solution that could make both sides happy? A place where money changed hands between parties, but editorial decisions still came into play?"
Commentators are quick to point out that while it as at least a step in some direction, it seems only a matter of time (and perhaps very quickly) before this system is also gamed, before money under the table is exchanged for the removal of nofollow tags, before reviewers run unscrupulous review systems. One suggests a more complicated system of credibility ranking, to help control for that.
Or the kind of credibility system like the one Google's been working on for years. Fishkin's proposal comes with unfortunate timing. Over the weekend,
In short, things aren't looking good for the paid post. At least, where one is openly or obviously paid.
A cynical contributor to "The irony is that most/all of the articles that he would prefer to see on the Google SERPS are researched, assembled and ghost written by pharma companies. Having worked with a number of clients in the medical field it's become more and more apparent that the 'studies' published by well-known academics are most often based on research by the drug companies, scripted by a hired copywriter and given to the academic to sign off and publish under their byline."
Surely, and one is also reminded of
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For even the purity of Wikipedia, which Google loves to champion, is not without its soiled fringes – what with
On to the next stage of grieving then, which is depression for SEOs now looking to bargain with Google about (overtly) paid anything – and that general malaise that comes with the cracking of an ideal that anything, even within Google's gleaming search rankings, is pure.
And acceptance? Well, if it ever comes, it will be accepting that our porcelain ideals are chipped in practice, are borrowed eventually from the realization that the Behaviorists were right (nothing is without prior motivation), and are never without a dark mirror of an ideal to contradict. But that's no reason not to have them, now is it?
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