This is a great discussion for people interested in ranking well in search engines. (See discussion “Matt Cutt’s SEO Advice”)
I hound the serps like a mad man hourly. I see that only link buying sites have great rankings (over time) in almost every sector. I am obsessed with analytics and tracking sources of traffic which converts. Every example on Matt Cutt’s blog, except that of (spencer), seems to be an ideological debate rather than one based on the actual serps.
Topic: “Are financially incentivized links spam or not?”
Google wants people to create fun/interesting content and/or put nofollow on all their marketing efforts. What is a paid back link anyway? If the following link is a real interview with Matt, it seems to show he acknowledges that paying your way to the top of Digg is cool since the sites that pull content from Digg are linking consensually. http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-matt-cutts-061608.shtml
Every form of site promotion is “paid” with time, money, favors or both. Matt even puts nofollow on the comments on his blog. Does that mean he paid for them? Did they earn the link by providing valuable content to Matt’s page? Only a few commenters on here are doing it to spam so why punish the honest commentators?
Why spammers keep spamming
People do what works. They try different techniques and ramp up and scale things that work. Everyone commenting on Matt’s blog seems to say that “spamming” is short lived. That is not the cold reality when you look at the serps for highly competitive search terms. The best a non spam site can get is lower first page in most cases. Google needs to crack down on paid spam if they really want to clean up the serps. They can’t take the brand of the site into consideration. If a powerful company is buying links then slap them too.
Why spam has not been stopped yet
The problem with that is most sites ranking well did all their spamming before Google took notice. Because they’ve accumulated thousands of links this way, Google has a hard time determining which links are paid and which are organic. Even if they disqualify 75% of the links the remaining ones are enough to dominate the serps. For that matter, Google doesn’t know what links are real or hacked. So what can Google really do about it? Are they going to go through 3 million links manually to figure out which are paid or not just to weed out one of millions of sites with spammy back links in high competitive industries? Impossible!
Will spam link building ever stop?
My opinion is that paid link buying will stay in practice until it stops becoming profitable. People follow their incentives and rationalize everything to justify their actions. I see obvious sidebar links, etc. all the time. When those are the “only” type of link a site has then you know it is benefiting them when they are ranking for competitive terms.
I sometimes contact the site owners and give them a link to the Google terms and they don’t care. The worst thing that can happen to the beneficiary of the link is that the link does not count for Google serps. If this were not true a competitor could link bomb any site with spam links to take them out of the serps game. The seller of the link my or may not suffer a penalty. There are a ton of other search engine’s that send real customers and traffic that end up making it worth it for many sites to buy links even when they are nofollowed. Nofollowing something makes only a small difference overall. A link is still advertising.
Conclusion of this post on SEO Spam
Once you get some income coming in, then start your long term SEO battle. Of course, optimize your site itself to make it worthy of ranking when the time comes. Start your split testing and analytics tracking in order to get the best converting design early. When the serp traffic comes you will be very happy you did. Did I mention exposure from normal paid advertising will accidentally bring you links also? By the way, link building for your site in the first few months (or year depending on competition) may be a not so cost effective task anyway. You may get more links early on through your efforts to develop a return on investment with regular marketing. In any event, betting your success on SEO is not a good bet. Hedge your bet with real marketing and when you hit the sweet spot then ramp up your external link building and SEO efforts to make a home run.
The fact is “all marketing affects your websites search engine position paid or not!”
Discussion of Matt Cutts Endorses Paid Link Building?