Why Text Links Ads Are Penalized But Adwords Are Not
brandondrury
Every day that I’ve been hard at work stalking the blogs and seo forums around the net, I run into multiple cases of people who say:
“Google is a bunch of hypocrites. They penalize sites that sell text links, but they sell text links themselves”.
While it is true that our pal Google may be selling text links for profit, they are doing it in a different manner. Let me explain.
How Google Makes Money
Google makes money primarily with Adwords. (To my limited knowledge on the subject, this is Google’s only revenue stream.). They make money with Adwords because people are using their search engine. It seams like a fair trade. They offer a free tool to use and they sell ads. (A very common practice online). Webmasters pay for each click they receive from the Adwords system with the intent of profiting from that click.
If Users Switched To Yahoo
For the sake of exaggeration, let’s just pretend half of Google’s users switched to Yahoo for a month. I’m not talking about webmaster / Adwords users. I’m talking about your mom searching for recipes or your little sister searching for Clay Aiken or whatever.
It’s reasonable to expect that Google’s profits would go down by 50% that month as well. The ONLY service that Google provides with their free tool is relevant search results. (At least that is the idea.) If I search for “surfboard toothpaste” and I don’t find it, I’ll find my “surfboard toothpaste” in some other manner.
Google’s View: Bribing To The Top of the Search Engines
The Google algorithm relies on “votes” to a site to determine where that site should rank. In other words, Google really doesn’t work all that differently from a site like Digg. Digg requires just a click, Google requires links from other sites. Paying for a link in Google is essentially a way of bribing your way to the top of the search engines. (Digg has aggressively gone after Pay-Per-Digg services since they render a site like Digg useless.) Some people debate the ethics of buying links, but I’d imagine that most people’s moral responsibility to Google is not as high as other moral obligations. I have the same obligation to Google as I do for Nike. Believe me, I’ve stepped in dog crap plenty of times with Nike shoes!!
Finally, How Is Text Link Ads Different Than Adwords?
Links on Google Adwords provide no direct SEO benefit. They pass absolutely no pagerank. The only purpose of Adwords is to drive traffic or brand a company.
A link on Text Link Ads offers a debatable low amount of traffic. (This depends greatly on the site selling the link and the genre of the link). Even if a Text Link Ads purchase does give you a little bit of traffic, that certainly isn’t the intent of the link. Text Link Ads customers are expecting to gain pagerank to their site to advance their search engine rankings (through what Google considers bribing). Of course, this is complicated by the fact that Google knows about each and every link given away.
Conclusion
Google has a vested interest in completely hammering anyone who is buying and selling links. They don’t want you messing with their money maker. So, anyone who messes with the Google system is fair game. Adwords does not mess with the Google ranking system, so Adwords is fine. However, purchased Text Links is a different story.
