Another Google Heads Up

During my blog hopping I try to visit those bloggers who visit and comment here. The other day I stopped by Eli's blog Business Sphere to read his article How To Get High Ranking For Your Blog in Google Search Engine. He has some great tips so do stop by to check out the article and say hi. In this post I would like to extend Eli's last point that Google does not like paid links. Why?

Google is in the business of indexing all possible information, essentially an electronic form of the precursor encyclopedias. At one time publishers of encyclopedias would hire door-to-door salesmen to sell the information they had gathered. They had taken their resources to create the publications so in return felt justified selling back the information to those interested. Fast forward to Google that is essentially doing the exact same thing except it is making the information freely available to all despite using its resources to collect that information. One way Google funds its enterprise is selling advertising to advertisers then having webmasters and bloggers voluntarily display those ads on their sites or blogs for a small amount of compensation. Of course Google doesn't like any other paid links other than the ones they can control. However, there is another very important reason why Google does not like paid links aka paid posts.

In order for Google to be effective, duplicate content needs to be minimized and ideally eliminated. Why? Well let's say you buy a magazine and read it. You buy a second magazine and virtually 80% of the articles are identical to the first magazine. Then you buy a third magazine that is 90% the content of the second. How impressed would you be paying 3 times for the same information. That is what happens with paid posts. The advertiser puts out a paid post request to which 100 bloggers write virtually identical articles meaning no new content for Google but at the same time it deflates the value of what Google might already have on that topic.

In addition to these two considerations Google does not like the fake selling by those who have no experience with the product or service and who do not reveal they are being somehow compensated. These types of posts are link spam.  There is some indication that Google will be making reporting these types of posts available in the near future.  There is also indication that those using paid posts will be penalized by Google by removing the blog from their index.

Now one thing that I have noticed is while Google does not like paid posts, paid links seems to be an entirely different issue providing they are done correctly.  I will address the issue of paid links in tomorrow's post as in some ways Google's position appears to be a bit of an oxymoron.

Garden Gnome
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