Can You Spot The Paid Link?

In Time For Google To
Give Up The Fight Against Paid Links? last week, I wrote about Google’s
second major war against paid links that’s now underway. Today, I came across
two examples that illustrate why this is such a difficult war for it to fight.
How do you spot the paid link hidden among others? And when a major player like
Scripps cross-promotes its shopping sites on newspaper sites it owns, is it
violating the spirit of no paid links even though technically, no one is paying
for the placement?

The
Paid Link Blog Meme from Michael Gray tries to have some fun, but also
seriousness, in demonstrating why the war is hard. Try to spot the paid links in
the crowd — or at least, the examples he provides. And if you can, how do you
know the site getting it wasn’t set up by someone trying to make someone else
look bad?

The various pay-to-blog services that have sprung up have sparked the renewed
paid links battle because of this very confusion. It’s easy to spot paid links
when they’re all shoved in the same place, or use the same anchor text on
hundreds of pages across the web or via other
signals.
But when these links are buried within textually-relevant content? Tough.

I also addressed the issue of the difficulty of knowing what’s "paid" in my
article when people might be bartering, or scratching each other on the back or
taking advantage of other non-paid relationships that still provide links in an
almost paid-like manner.

Shopzilla Learns About Link Building from Comparison Engines provides some
examples of this, demonstrating how Scripps
— which owns newspapers and broadcast stations across the United States — is
leveraging those web sites to drive traffic to its Shopzilla, BizRate and
uSwitch web sites through links.

Check out this
page about a toy being found on the road in Cleveland that motorists thought
was an alligator. It was from a Scripps-owned TV news site. Down at the bottom
we have these relevant links:

Comparison Shop for
Digital
Cameras and

iPod Shuffles at
Shopzilla &


BizRate
uSwitch.com compares
gas &
electricity,
home
phone,
mobile phones,
broadband,
credit
cards,
loans and
car
insurance

Now BizRate itself only shows up if you have JavaScript enabled — and then,
is flagged nofollow (sort of a waste of time, since search engines won’t see
that link at all, not running JavaScript). All the other links are regular, pass
the link-love style.

These links are clearly only on this page because of the Scripps relationship
and to almost certainly craft keyword-rich anchor text to drive rankings for the
terms shown.

How are they doing? Hard to know if they are the main reason, but uSwitch
ranks tops for home phone,
sixth for broadband,
fourth for credit cards.
As for BizRate, it’s seventh for
digital cameras and
10th for ipod shuffles.
That’s five of the 10 key terms the links are targeting generating rankings. Not
bad.

Will Google ban these sites? Not on your life. Knock down the value of the
actual links in question themselves? Naturally. Wipe out the link-giving power
of these sites overall. Hard to do, when dealing with trusted news sites. Wipe
out too much, and you hurt relevancy in other ways.

Ban the shopping sites? Well,
Google Warning Against
Letting Your Search Results Get Indexed from last month covers how Google’s
already fired up the read flags for shopping sites. This isn’t going to help the
Scripps properties if they find themselves slipping out of Google.

But the bigger point remains. When it looks like everyone is doing paid links
— and even what is "paid" continues to get confusing — is this something
Google and the other search engines really think they can control?