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Marketing Pilgrim Live – Are Paid Links Evil?

posted on August 28, 2007

On this week’s episode of Marketing Pilgrim, I offer up my thoughts on whether paid links are evil and, more importantly, whether Google can actually spot them or not.


Note: For some reason Ustream didn’t capture the video smoothly, but the audio should be fine.

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  • Jordan McCollum

    Oh, man, is it Tuesday already? I can’t believe I missed this again!

  • http://www.ginside.com/ Jonathan Dingman

    This seems to be the hottest topic on the net right now…heh

    I’m starting to think that Google’s new motto should be… “we’re not evil, but your links are”

  • Jeremy Luebke

    Had a meeting so had to missed it, but just watched it and great stuff. Spot on!

  • http://www.nethustlin.com Crystal

    Paid links are unconstitutional? lol, that’s ridiculous. Honestly, I don’t see what is wrong with paid links. They are all over and Google is still by far the best search engine and the content is relevant 99.9% of the time. great points, btw

  • http://andybeard.eu/ Andy Beard

    Sometimes I feel I have got evidence that Google can detect paid links within content, but it is hard to be for sure because their link: command is so flaky.

    Then there is the question about why they might discount openly declared but highly relevant links within cornerstone content (that happened to be paid), yet they don’t discount links to clients or offtopic links in a sidebar.

    I would have loved some commentary on my ebay epinions rent.com interlinking, and in what way Ebay will benefit from Stumbleupon.

  • http://www.brianchappell.com Brian Chappell

    “Sometimes I feel I have got evidence that Google can detect paid links within content”

    If its relevant, and a one off link, I would love to here your theories how they can determine that. It just cannot be possible without significant collateral damage. My 2 cents at least.

  • http://www.bogaziciperde.com Perde

    Google webmaster tools actually have a paid link reporting form. They say they’ll review each report they get and use this feedback to improve the algorithms and search results. In some cases they may also take individual action on sites.

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