Google Paid Link Flaw : Why Google Will Fail

This is a guest post from Demerzel’s SEO Blog on the big fallacy of Google Search.

This guest post is entirely dedicated to the problems of Google’s algorithm and not about the fairness of what it is doing. If you’re looking for a shoulder to cry on, you’re barking up the wrong tree as Google is entirely within its rights (at this point) to do what it wants for its search engine. As such, if you’re looking to rant and rave on that issue, go visit the following blogs:

• Johnon
• Graywolf
• SEO Book
• Matt Cutts

However, if you’re looking to understand why Google will ultimately fail as a search engine in trying to keep a large emphasis on link juice, then read on.

 

Background

A little background on what Google has been achieving and is trying to keep: Google has been able to allow millions of people across the Internet to tell its algorithm robots what website is popular and for what keyword phrases. Trying to fully understand how that is done is the field of search engine optimization (SEO), and although there are a variety of factors (title tags, meta-tags, etc.), what site and how they link to you is one of the strongest factors around.

Google’s strength (and really the reason for why it sucks) is primarily around three factors: usability (simplicity of use), its huge database of websites, and its promise for not basing its results on paying Google for the organic spots. Nothing more, nothing less. I can quickly go to Google, type in a phrase, and know that Google has updated its index honestly, recently, and deeply enough around the web to get an idea of what’s truly out there—not necessarily what I want (for otherwise Google would not suck), but rather what it thinks I want.

Those three factors have been what put Google above and beyond almost every other search engine around the globe, with exceptions in Russia and China (Google does not understand nationalism and how that factors heavily there) and Korea (late entry against a competitor that controls content people want—something akin to Yahoo’s Answers). In the US, Yahoo took too long to load, Ask clutters things around too much, and MSN, well, few products from Microsoft are good (except for Visio).

Once Google had its position, power, and cash, it could buy up any and all competitors along with hiring the best and the brightest.

The Reason Google Sucks

So where does Google’s algorithm flaw lies at this point? Mainly upon its desire to produce honest organic results without people paying to get high up in those results. Google loves to publicly note that its results are not the results of payments from others, which small start-ups, local mom & pop stores, corporations, a single person’s video, etc. can all compete against each other fairly as long as you are creative enough. And for awhile this was true as online marketing was still new and as Search Strategists had to deal with many engines and optimize for all of them overall.

What Google loves to show-boast was as long as you got links, however creatively done (link-bait), you could rise up against established websites that spent time and energy from years ago. So, naturally, as more people began to understand how Google’s algorithm worked on some level, competition rose and ways of going around what Google wanted would arise. That’s how paid links began to become a larger flaw in Google’s algorithm.

Paid Links Flaw

See, Google weights heavily who links and how they link to what website and in that way, therefore, a popular website like Yahoo.com were to link to this blog about why Google sucks, then suddenly this blog could do rather well in the search results. Well, once this became widely known, then essentially “site” endorsements from text link ads began to become quite popular.

To understand this a little better, let’s take it offline for a minute. Let’s say you are a salesman and you have a new product:

Okay, so to be honest, you probably don’t look nearly as good as that thing, but regardless, you have a new product to sell with the whole process all lined up and ready to go:

You’ve done the research, manufacturing, packaging, sellers, and distributors for a product that improves your chess playing performance (let’s call it Chessroids), but are struggling to get it on the shelves in prominent places of stores so customers will see it and buy it.

What do you do? Well, offline you have some possible avenues:

You can do telemarketing, but everyone hates those a-holes. You can make it a mandatory product like Microsoft does by bundling it in with a lot of useless stuff; another way to piss off people. You can give seminars which are a nice informative way to get people to know about your product, but has a limited scope. There’s always giving out free content to people (like AOL did) and hope that the idiots will actually use the product rather than have it as a coaster. Then there’s paying celebrities to market your brand and promote the product. I’m probably worth about $500 a month for promoting some kind of chess product, but regardless of that, paying people to promote your content helps bring it visibility and the more visibility, the more likely stores are going to put your product front and center.

So, let’s turn this around and go back to the online sphere:

We can see that there are similarities already: Email (spam) is the telemarketing of the offline world. Webinars are just like seminars in their scope, with Stat Counter providing a nice little badge that in a subtle way provides backlinks. As always you have link-bait which is about getting people who are the idiots of the Internet for how to rank well on search engines in some creative or non-creative way. Lastly, you can deal with popular websites and pay them some kind of fee (paid links) to promote your brand that can help get your to the top, just like you would want in real life.

This is where Google is trying to change the natural way of getting products placed. Essentially, Google wants to discount the use of celebrities (popular websites) as a factor for ranking well, but cannot and in my opinion, will not be able to do so algorithmically. And when more companies began to do this, the more the results lose their trustworthiness, leading to a nice downward spiral for Google’s search engine.

And before there is a comparison to democracy and voting, note that it is far easier to tell a vote by one person that by an infinite number of websites (hence why all online polls in my opinion suck and are absolutely non-statistical). Furthermore, Google does not give everyone a one-to-one ratio, but rather an inequitable ratio that only makes buying links that much easier.

Simply put, if you want to allow for an honest result or honest ranking, you cannot do so by popular voting (ie: linking) as people will sell their votes for money (unless Google is willing to up the penalties and penalize websites that may be buying links, but then, that leads to potential anti-trust suits for ruining business based on hearsay) and as long as Google focuses on links as one of the major determining factor, its search results will diminish over time and turn Google into a worse search engine than it is now.