Edited version, please see note at the end of this post.
Andy Beal from MarketingPilgrim talked with Adam Lasnik from Google this Friday about Google’s stance on paid links and the discussion about the usage of the nofollow attribute.
What Google looks for are patterns that suggest money is being exchanged for links. ….
… However, links from one relevant site to another, would not likely cause a reaction from Google (although they would still prefer you to use a nofollow tag).Â
Loren, here at SEJ reported about it and I left a comment, which was followed by a very similar one from a fellow affiliate marketer with the name Wendy Piersall who earns money from affiliate marketing on her “eMoms at home†site and blog.
I find Google’s attitude both dangerous and based on faulty logic. Just because a link is paid for on a site, certainly doesn’t mean that it should be valued less. What about an affiliate link that points straight to a site? What if the site I’m linking to is relevant?
I deserve to be compensated for the benefit that my advertising client gets for the traffic that I send over.
I PAY to get these visitors to my site in the first place (via PPC, advertising, or long hours spent on content creation, PR and promotion).
Is there something wrong with advertisers wanting to earn better rankings from paid links? Google certainly benefits from this business model, why shouldn’t advertisers?
I wrote more than once about the problems with the nofollow attribute. I illustrated what links are and what they are not and why I supported the nofollow tag in the case of Wikipedia or actually pushed actively for it for months. Something that does not seem to make sense, because I became a complete opponent of the nofollow attribute over the past 15 months and actively call for the abolishment of the use of nofollow by Search Engines.
I also provided ideas and recommendations how to come to a solution for the problems.
No, I have not developed a new algorithm that will solve all the problems. I only pointed out things that should be considered in one way or another by any attempt for an alternative method of how to evaluate and treat links.
During the whole discussion, did I notice something?
Google does not get it or does not want to (I think the latter is closer to the truth). In addition, Search Marketers have a problem of grasping the complete magnitude of the problem for Affiliate marketers because of the conflicting nature of Google’s statements if applied to affiliate marketing.
The recommendations might be suited or acceptable for the application to advertising space on websites and paid product reviews a la PayPerPost and similar services, but it is certainly not for Affiliate marketing.
The SEO community freaked out over statements by an unimportant PPC/SEM that SEO is not rocket science and by statements from a VC who is a Web 2.0 evangelist that SEO’s are (for the most part) scumbags and worthless.
They had at least the curtsey to say that to the SEO community straight into the face and not by talking about you in third person to somebody else while you are standing right next to them.
That is what Google is doing about affiliate marketers with statements like this. The core and origin of affiliate marketing is about generating income from your site by providing content and information about things you like or know and receiving a commission for referring a customer to a merchant or service provider who sells the stuff you are talking about.
Not passive Ads sitting in a separated section of the site where you can say:
“It’s advertising so I don’t have an opinion about it. It might be crap or it might be great. Find out for yourself and leave me aloneâ€.
No, grass root affiliate marketing is about taking the responsibility for WHAT you promote or advertise and HOW you do that.
Sure, you can make a quick buck by recommending crap to people, but you can only do that once, because your reputation is down the drain. Not such a good way of building a long-term affiliate marketing based business, I guess.
Let me use some SEO terminology, which might help the search marketers to understand the core of the problem.
Affiliate marketing has also the problems, just like SEO that black sheep’s or BLACK HATS that use questionable methods to generate money via the affiliate marketing channel give the whole industry a bad name, but the existence of those Affiliate BLACK HATS does not make all Affiliates bad and to black hats as well.
Making an affiliate link nofollow (a WHITE HAT affiliate link), is like you optimizing a clients site perfectly for search engines and then have the search engines come along and forcing a User-agent: * and Disallow: / to be added to the robots.txt file.
Confused? Yeah, search engines would not spider the site anymore. They think its junk before even looking at it, because an SEO optimized it. Therefore, it must be junk (if Search Engines would think that what they probably not). They would not say that of course, but have the site owner add the little tags to the mostly unnoticeable little .txt file in the website root.
Now if that would happen and I would be a SEO, what would I think about this?
I cannot speak for other people, but I would probably be very upset, to put it mildly. It would be a direct threat to me means of generating income to support my family and me. I would certainly not just do nothing and sit it out.
It’s already bad enough if somebody comes up to you and tells you right in the face that he thinks that all SEO are the worthless, a waste of time and money and only a fake that does not provide any value whatsoever. That everything I do will not even be worth the time looking at and check, because it must be worthless too since it comes from somebody that is worthless himself.
Is anybodies blood reaching boiling temperature yet?
Hey at least you would have gotten it said right into your face instead of learning about it indirectly during a conversation between the Search Engines and your client , where you are physically present but treated as if you are not in the same room. You would be considered so worthless that SE would not even let himself down to a level to even acknowledge your basic existence.
This is what is happening here. If “selling a link†means receiving ANY rewards or financial gain from the existence of the link, then every affiliate link must be using the nofollow attribute, based what we heard so far from any Googler that at least touches the subject nofollow
That on the other hand means that an affiliate has to give up its own integrity and authority to degrade a link to something that the link is not.
Google cannot tell very accurate, which affiliate is a thug and which one is honest.
The thug is only in the game for the quick bucks and does not care about his or hers long term reputation and permanent damage from doing dishonest referrals.
The honest affiliate on the other hand stands behind the referral with his or hers entire authority and puts his or hers entire reputation on the line and tries to build a long term trust relationship with the people its referring to different advertisers.
It seems that the current choices Google offers to an honest affiliate today are two.
The first choice is, getting screwed by penalties because of paid editorial links to an advertiser without marking them nofollow. Something similar to what Google does to with the BLACKHAT affiliate that puts up links that pay the most on scraped or no content whatsoever.
The alternative is to admit guilt before doing anything and give up authority and reputation by flagging links that are honest recommendations with nofollow, which signals to the Search Engines the complete opposite of the actual intention, lie and hence proof that they are thugs too and only have the monetary rewards in mind.
Great choices, risking sudden death when becoming a number in the false positive statistics due to detection of a large number of affiliate (paid links) without flagging them nofollow or commit suicide by lying about the intent of the link and adding the nofollow tag to ruin your websites linking structure and patterns. Many pages of the site now appearing in shiny red when accessed via Firefox with SEO for FF plug-in and nofollow highlighting enabled.
Editor Note:
I edited this post heavily because of some references to the horrific events in Nazi Germany during World War II. Several readers of the SEJ community completely misunderstood or misinterpreted my references. I provided detailed clarifications in my comments but realized that this was going too much off the actual topic of my original post. Search Engine Journal is not a political blog and thus not the right place for discussions of that nature.
I made the full original article (which is very much stronger in tone) and the original first five comments available on my personal website.
I would like you to invite to read the original unedited post and more importantly the comments that followed.
I believe that the discussion is very important and that it provides the opportunity to discuss things, usually not talked about in public, in a resourceful and educational manner.
Be warned, the tone of the post is very explicit and the second subject is very sensitive and hard to discuss without bias and emotional attachment. The discussion about the problem with nofollow and affiliate marketing shall continue here at SEJ where it belongs.
Carsten Cumbrowski March 3rd, 4:30 pm (PST).
Cheers!
Carsten Cumbrowski
Affiliate Marketer and Entrepreneur
Comments
14 responses so far ↓
Jeremy Luebke on Mar 3, 2007 at 12:21 pm
Just think of it this way. Affiliate Marketers are Google’s biggest competition. Google wants everyone to use Google to find what they are looking for on the web. When an affiliate marketer provides useful information that enables users to find what they are looking for, they are in turn letting the user circumvent Google. They want to send the traffic to the originator and get the money that the affiliate marketer would have once gotten.
CarstenCumbrowski on Mar 3, 2007 at 12:49 pm
I got that, but they are beating around the bush (again) and don’t just say it.
Btw. Guess who helped Google to become what it did?
“Pay Per Click? What is that? Go to Google and do a search. Look to the right. See all those Affiliate Ads? That’s Pay Per Click”
This could have been a true quote from a conversation in 2000-2002.
…”thanks guys and sorry that we now have to kill you. It’s not personal, honestly, it’s just business… you know.”
It’s cynic Saturday today I guess ;)
Wendy Piersall on Mar 3, 2007 at 1:05 pm
Thanks for the mention. I’ve been mulling this idea ever since the first post I read here yesterday.
There is a world of difference between a spammy paid link, and a quality ad buy. Media buyers spend just as much time finding relevant ad space as we do creating quality content.
That either of us should be penalized for this is like punishing a town because one criminal lives on main street.
If Google required the use of ‘nofollow’ on all paid links, it would put a company like Text Link Ads out of business, which is by and far one of the best sources of revenue for bloggers - and Google l-o-v-e-s blogs.
It certainly represents quite a contradiction in priorities, imho.
paolo la valle on Mar 4, 2007 at 3:48 am
mi best regards
Bashar Abdullah on Mar 4, 2007 at 4:50 am
inlinks are one of the best ways to measure a site’s success and growth. Ads are becoming more and more annoying in many sites. Imagine if Google would count your paids links on Yahoo as valid links, what would happen to the ranking algorithms? How would people search for their desired results? Affiliate marketer, like me, would get more customers, but the overall result is a disaster.
Google started in the first place to provide better results. This way, it’s bigger budget results not relevant necessarily. I would hate to use a search engine that sorts results based on money they pay. Would you like to use such one?
Esrun on Mar 4, 2007 at 2:55 pm
Interesting comments about no-follow tags although I think their effectiveness is arguable.
CarstenCumbrowski on Mar 6, 2007 at 10:41 am
Hey Bashar,
if it is an editorial placed link they better count it. if I search for products to buy, yes , then I want to see those, but here we are at intent again.
SE see a link as a vote today and not the intent and the nofollow attribute is a rating of that vote. A very strict vote which only has 2 values, like and don’t like, no gray, no scale no 1 - 10 points or 1 - 5 Star rating option.
That was what I pointed out in this post. If you need an attribute that is used as rating, make it a scale, from - to, from dislike to like and shades in between,
But I don’t like the rating aspect very much, not only because of the ability to manipulate it too easy, but also because I think it does not help too much to improve search results
More important would be a way to classify links that help the SE to determine which results to show to a user based on his intent.
SE experiment a lot to figure the users inlet out. Microsoft has an Experimental slide where the user can change the setting to “commercial” on the one side and “research” on the other.
They use keywords in the query if provided, like ”buy”, “shop”; “info”, ”how”, “learn” etc.
Also the users past search history etc., I like the MS approach, because the user can state his intention, and does not have to rely on the SE to figure it out (or not).
CarstenCumbrowski on Mar 15, 2007 at 10:57 am
This comment got lost during the change of the hosting provider on the weekend when I made the post. I did not realize that the comment did not get transfered until now. Here it is again:
…
This is part of Matt Cutt’s earlier comments which were moved to this url together with the original post. Since this part is on topic am I including it now in this form.
“I’m not sure what you’re trying to say with that? Google has tried to communicate with webmasters more than any other search engine, in my experience.
For example, we’ve said for years for affiliate marketers to look at the value-add that they deliver to users. There are tons of great sites that monetize in different ways (including affiliate marketing); the criteria for good sites is the same litmus test that searchers use: if you do a search and get a bunch of cookie-cutter sites with little or no value-add, that’s a bad search experience because it hurts the diversity of the search results. That’s why we’ve always recommended looking at what unique services, resources, information, or other hooks you can provide on your site (whether it is an affiliate or not).
I don’t think other search engines have talked much about their advice or opinions for affiliate marketers, but I’m happy to admit that I could be wrong.”
Matt, we are on the same page. This was also discussed in the affiliate marketing community. See here for example.
This is also not the problem. I see a problem with adding a nofollow to an affiliate link, because it is a “paid” link and the problems that come from either doing it or the problems that come from not doing it.
I refer to statements made in some of Google’s guides for paid “Raters” that review sites that come back in the search results. See http://www.threadwatch.org/node/2709
For example the “Spam Recognition Guide for Raters” about “Thin Affiliate Doorway Pages”.
“Observe where the links on the site take you. If the links are overwhelmingly leading you to one affiliate program, this is a strong signal that the site is a Thin Affiliate. Likewise, if the pages on the site are homogenous, and the links go to one or more affiliate programs, this is also a strong candidate.”
Some examples that follow are actually pretty good, but several points are missing and I would not be surprised if a lot of false positives sites were flagged as spam and removed from the Google index .
What I also would like to know is, if Google bans site as a whole because of such ratings and also if rated sites will undergo additional reviews by experienced/senior raters that have a much broader knowledge about what is going on on the internet to prevent false positives to become a victim of this. Next question: If a site things that it became a victim of this, where can it go to appeal and make a case for itself. The Webmaster Central reinclusion request form seems to be inefficient to me since it does not provide the option to state that you think that you got removed because of an error or even because of malicious activities of somebody else. I am having an idle domain hanging there myself and wait for answers for over a year now. Haven’t heard a word yet.
“One cannot both be an affiliate of others and offer affiliation opportunities.”
Really? There are thousands of examples of sites that proof that this statement is incorrect.
What also becomes an issue is the question what happens to a site where a large number, if not the majority of outbound links are nofollow. When Wikipedia made all links nofollow did it cause a lot of speculation about what the impact would be for Wikipedia itself and for a lot of other websites that are linked to by Wikipedia. Now Wikipedia is so big and obviously considered an authority site with high relevance that I would not be surprised if Google ignores the nofollow sometimes. Most affiliate sites don’t have this luxury and will feel the (probably negative) impact of that in full force.
If you could provide some information about that issue, I would appreciate it.
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