The value of a link will remain
Google’s recent crackdown on PageRank, targeting larger sites, is intended to burst the economic bubble of the text link ad market.
In some ways it is working. Several high-profile sites have decided to bow before Google and eliminate the selling of text link ads.
However, let me suggest that the game that Google is playing right now will not make a long-term dent in the text link ad market. Here’s why.
Google’s current method for handling the market focuses on high-profile sellers. But that’s not the issue. The issue is that it is largely a manual penalty that won’t scale well across the web.
In other words, Google has been unable to algorithmically solve the problem and has turned to the Internet community for help. And the ring leader of this crackdown? Matt Cutts at Google who officially started the crackdown with a post at his blog.
Which has people asking Is Matt Cutts the link nazi?
What exactly is a link nazi? A link nazi is someone who polices who you can have relationships with and who you can’t have relationships with. Links, after all, are the fundamental unit for measuring relationships between pages on the Internet. The link nazi says “no links for you!”
But the act of policing the way people link on the internet just can’t won’t work over the long haul. Especially with jerryrigged principles like nofollow and manual policing.
Links will always remain valuable, and people will always pay for that value. And most importantly of all, the value of a link does not depend on PageRank. So the method by which Google has gone about policing the market is wrongheaded… and will not stop the buying and selling of links. It may create a slowdown in the market…
But over the long haul, if Google keeps its Link Nazi policies in place, it will actually lose market share…because (and this is the critical point) the value of a link is deeper than Google and Google *can* be replaced.
The best search engine, rather than jerryrigging a green bar, will be the best at identifying the value of each link based on semantics and trust. In other words, Google could very easily use free-market principles … the text link market itself … to encourage quality linking.
Make the value of a link clear… and the market will reflect that value. But if you blur the value of a link with your little green bar (by making some links appear much more valuable than they are) you’re only creating opportunity for someone else to come in and do a better job at establishing the value of a link.
Related Articles:
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- Are Text Link Ads Like Crack?
- Secrets To Building Links To Your Niche Minisite
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