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The Google Conspiracy Theory
By Mark Daoust (c) 2006

In December, I published an article on the effect of purchasing
links for pagerank (http://www.site-reference.com/articles/
Search-Engines/Purchasing-Links-for-Pagerank.html). Much to my
surprise, I got quite a bit of feedback – most of which was
negative. The feedback echoed a sentiment that I have seen from
more than one person involved in the SEO industry. It is a
sentiment that seems to think that Google is happily
manipulating the entire SEO and webmaster community for their
own profitable gain. The whole idea seemed like a conspiracy.

I generally do not like conspiracies.

What Was Said

The article on purchasing links for page rank was supposed to
look simply at whether link buying was a good practice for
website owners. The conclusion I reached and tried to prove was
that any website owner who wanted to take a long-term approach
to SEO should avoid buying links. The primary reason behind this
conclusion is Google and Yahoo's adamant stance against
purchasing links for search engine gain. Although several
website owners are currently purchasing links and seeing a
positive effect, this does not mean that Google is not actively
trying to detect those who purchase links to devalue those
purchased links. Website owners who may be successful now with
this strategy may find themselves with a not so successful
ranking if Google detects that their ranking is the result of
purchased links.

The responses I received against Google were numerous. However,
the idea that Google was trying to make SEO more difficult by
discouraging link exchanges and link purchasing for website
owners in order to force more people into their Adsense program
was a theme that ran throughout all the responses.

So is this true? Is Google looking to undermine the honest
efforts of honest webmasters who are just looking for a decent
ranking in the world's most popular search engine? Did the
Googleplex devise a grand and sinister plan to force the wallets
of small business owners?

If Google Is Against Link Buying, Then Why Do They Sell Links
Through Adwords?

Jim Tarabocchia of Just Binoculars (http://www.just-binoculars.com/)
was quick to point out that Google would be hypocritical to
encourage website owners to not purchase text links. After all,
as Jim put it, "if this is the case, why does Google sell
Adwords"?

This is a good point.

It is obvious that Google believes in the power of link
advertising – it represents the largest share of Google's
revenue. If Google were indeed against text link advertising,
there would be only one conclusion that we could draw: Google
does not like text link advertising because they want to be the
only ones to sell text links. Therefore, Google is using the
power of their network and the desire that every website owner
has to get a top ranking in Google to get more people to buy
Adwords, and force any text-link competition out of business.

The problem with this conclusion is that Google is not
penalizing websites for text link advertising if it is done in a
certain manner. I will concede that Google probably does want to
gain as much market share as possible in the text link
advertising industry, but so does every other text link ad
network. This does not mean with any certainty that Google is
changing their SEO requirements to eliminate the text link
advertising industry.

In fact, one could even argue that Google has protected the
industry. The introduction of the "nofollow" tag found its birth
in a need to curb blog comment spam. Whenever a link has this
attribute added on, Google and a few other search engines will
not pass on any pagerank to the site being linked to. This has
served as a way for website owners to sell text links as
advertisements without being mistaken as participating in a
program to artificially raise a website's ranking in the search
engine.

Google is not against text link advertising – they are against
purchasing text links for the purpose of manipulating your
search engine rankings. It is these purchased links that they
are trying to detect and that their engineers have warned
webmasters about.

The Argument Against Google: You Have No Choice But Adwords

Jim continued with his points in a follow up email:

"In my opinion, Google does not want this done because sites that
begin to rank well no longer need to purchase text links through
adwords or adsense. This means less revenue for Google. Let's
face it, in order to receive traffic through the engines you
need to rank well, if you don't then your only other option is
to purchase your position through adwords or adsense. And in my
opinion if you are buying adwords then it is EXACTLY the same
thing if you were to buy text links from someone else to get
your PR to boost up and achieve better results in the engines."

Jim responded directly to my defense of Google. As I stated in
the previous section, Google is not against purchasing text
links for advertising purposes, they are only against purchasing
links for the purpose of getting a top ranking. Jim makes the
point that buying links for pagerank to get a top ranking is
essentially the same thing as buying a top ranking through
Adwords.

The problem is that it is not the same thing. The first problem
with this idea is that it equates natural rankings as being
equal in value to paid listings. Paid listings have shown time
and time again that they are not nearly as effective as an
organic ranking. Users are much more likely to trust a website
if they find it through an organic listing.

Yet Jim is not alone in his point. Many website owners believe
that Google wants to keep sites from ranking well in order to
turn them to Adwords. Bruce from A1 Web Design
(http://www.a1-web-design.co.uk/) had this to say:

"How on earth does a new website online get ranked? Mmmmm... PPC
and Adsense! Now there's a good topic... Google frowns upon links
but has created its own linking affiliate scheme!"

The idea that Google wants every website owner to participate in
Adwords is not a new idea, and it probably is not far from the
truth. After all, I don't know any business that would turn down
an offer to sell their product to every person in their industry.
But the idea that Google is somehow trying to force website
owners into purchasing an Adwords campaign puts Google into a
sinister light.

Google Cannot Prevent Websites From Ranking Well

There is only a limited number of websites that will achieve a
top ranking for any keyword. In fact, we know exactly how many
websites will receive a top ranking. On the first page, there
will be 10 ranked websites, on the second page their will also
be 10 websites, etc. The fact is, for any given keyword,
regardless of how many people are competing for that keyword,
there are a fixed number of top rankings available.

Both Tim and Bruce implied that Google wants to keep websites
out of the top 10 to force them to Adwords. The problem with
this is that Google cannot keep websites out of the top 10. They
always must rank at least 10 websites in the top 10, as well as
10 more websites in the top 20, and so on. It does not matter if
Google discounts link exchanges or purchased links, or if they
turn traditional SEO practices on its head, they still are
forced to rank a certain fixed number of websites well for any
given keyword. Regardless of how hard they try, they cannot
force a greater number of people to Adwords through preventing
the achievement of a favorable ranking.

The theory that Google's organic listings and paid listings are
linked in some way is not a new theory. In this scenario, we can
see that it is an impossibility for Google to turn more people
to paid listings by making organic listings more difficult to
attain. Regardless of how difficult they make the ranking
criteria, we will always have a fixed number of websites that
rank well.

Does Google Reward Adsense Users With Favorable Rankings?

Another conspiracy theory that seems to have a lot of believers
is that Google somehow rewards its Adsense advertisers or even
publishers with more favorable rankings. That is, if you spend a
regular amount of money on paid listings, Google will then treat
you more favorably in their natural search results. The theory
would make Pavlov's dog drool.

Once again, however, we have a problem. This time we simply fail
to see any empirical evidence to support this theory. When
Adwords first was released, several SEO's tested this theory buy
purchasing paid listings over varied lengths in time. The
results? There was absolutely no correlation between purchasing
an Adwords account and your organic search ranking.

Back to What Was Said

So in the article that spawned this mini-debate, I came to the
conclusion that purchasing links for the purpose of attaining a
better organic listing in the search engines was not a good
idea. The reason it was not a good idea is that the search
engines do not like purchased links. The criticism of this
article seemed to want to establish a link between Adwords and
Google's organic listings – that somehow Google was trying to
encourage more users to use Adwords rather than aspiring after
an organic listing.

But we do not see any evidence that Adwords and Google's organic
listings are linked in any way. In fact, it is fairly well known
that Google has separated their Adwords department entirely from
their organic search listing department in an effort to keep the
two from influencing each other.

So if Google is not going after link purchasers for their own
personal financial gain, why are they so much against link
purchasing and even some forms of link exchanges? This is the
question that I tried to answer in the last article. Evidently I
did not answer it as well as I could have, but you may want to
go back and read it (http://www.site-reference.com/articles/
Search-Engines/Purchasing-Links-for-Pagerank.html).

If I were to summarize the article, however, I would simply say
that Google discourages purchasing links for the purpose of
getting a higher pagerank as well as exchanging links only for
the purposes of pagerank because it is usually done as an
attempt to manipulate their rankings.

So What Should You Do

So if purchasing text links for pagerank is not a good idea, and
since it seems as if Google is now trying to devalue links that
are a part of a planned link exchange program, what should
website owners do? What is the plan to get a top ranking?

You should still try to get inbound links to your website. You
can even do so through link exchanges, although you should try
to do so as naturally as possible. What does this mean? It means
only linking to sites that are of value to your visitors, and
being willing to link to a website without a link in return. It
means getting rid of that enormous directory on your website that
leads to tens or hundreds of websites that are really only there
for the sake of getting a higher pagerank. It means that you
should also engage in activities outside of direct SEO that
could garner you free links. Press releases and news stories as
well as writing exclusive articles are all powerful ways to get
free links without having to do anything in return.

Whether or not you agree or disagree with Google's approach to
link exchanges, if for no other reason than for the sake of your
users, you should always approach link exchanges as a way to
offer more value to your users. What you will find when you take
this approach is that your traffic will increase more than any
link exchange program can bring, and your search engine rankings
will increase as well.
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Mark Daoust is the owner of Site Reference
(http://www.site-reference.com). If you want to reference this
article, please reference it at its original published location:
(http://www.site-reference.com/articles/Search-Engines/
The-Google-Conspiracy-Theory.html)
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