Webmasters love to hate Google when it comes to Google’s consideration techniques of backlinks. Webmasters know one thing, irrespective of backlinks, they need to get those backlinks to work well. Google, on the other hand, is there to remove any backlink which is paid so users can get only organic results.
Paid links remain a very shady area for all of us. Which links are exactly paid links and how can Google sniff those out. Matt Cutts recently answered, rather at length, about this question which is bugging the webmasters for a long time now.
The Clearly Clear Paid Links
There are so many cases where an experienced SEO can easily pick up a link as a paid link. This is the case even when some webmaster thinks he is being cunning about it.
“The vast majority of the time things are incredibly clear: people are paying money outright for links based on PageRank, flowing the PageRank, trying to get high the rankings, Ninety-nine percent of the time it’s abundantly clear that these are links that are being bought and paid and sold and all that sort of stuff,” Matt Cutts said.
But then there arises the question, what if the backlink isn’t really paid but the company has just bought lunch to the webmaster. Will that nice little gesture be considered as paid link as well? Where is the limit or the book of code of conduct? Cutts tries to explain it.
Cost of the Link
If you receive peanuts like a T-shirt or a pen at a conference, it will not help you to write exceptionally well for the company. But what you get might vary greatly in the monetary value and this is why the evaluation gets tricky. Let’s quote Matt Cutts
Sometimes people might say something like, “Hey, I’d like to send you a gift card.” You know what gift cards are pretty fundable you can convert them to money and back and forth… On the other hand, something like “I’m going to give you a free trial of perfume” or “I’m going to buy you a beer” or something like that, that’s less of a connection.But we do look at how close something is to actual money when we look at those kinds of things. If somebody goes and buys you a dinner and you write a blog post four months later, and the dinner wasn’t some huge steak dinner with 18 courses … that’s probably not the sort of thing we worry about, as you would guess.
Gift or Loan
What if the product you just reviewed was only loaned to you and was not really a gift? The item in discussion can be a very costly mobile phone.
“Another criterion we use is whether something is a gift or loan, So imagine, for example, that somebody loaned out a car for someone to try out for a week versus giving them a car. There’s a big difference there,” Cutts concluded.
This is truer when the reviewed product is even bigger like a car. Not many car bloggers can buy all those new models coming out every month to test and review them. The car companies are not willing to send out costly cars either, in return of a few backlinks. Just doesn’t make sense, right?
“If somebody’s giving you a review copy, and you have to return it, that a relatively well-respected thing where people understand, ‘OK I’m trying this out (I’m a gadget reviewer or whatever) and then see if I like this camera, but I do have to send it back.” Cutts said “Whereas if someone sends you a camera and said, ‘you know what, keep it,’ that’s something that’s much closer to material compensation in our opinion,”
Intention and Audience
It is very hard to judge intentions, and Google accepts it as well. However, if you translate it like, someone is paying you to get a backlink from your site, one intention is quit clear. And this is the case in most of the cases.
Cutts gave the example of a product with free trial offer. The intention here is not that the backlinks are given in return of the trial period but to sell it when the trial period is over and tell other people about it.
Cutts said, “The difference would be where we’ve encountered people who are supposed to be reporters, who would say if you give us a laptop then we will write nice story about you, and it’s giving me a laptop not borrowing a laptop,”
Expected Compensation or Pleasant Surprise
Lastly Cutts discussed the point whether the compensation which the webmaster might receive is expected or a pleasant surprise.
OK for a movie reviewer, getting a free ticket to watch the movie might not be that big a reward nor it is surprising. But if the reviewer is reviewing a laptop and he demands or gets to keep the laptop he is reviewing then that is a surprise. It is ever more surprising if the laptop is not what is being reviewed at all but is being accepted as a gift.
Cutts mentioned it rather flatly that they reserve the rights to take action against any such techniques which are trying to manipulate or influence the google search algorithm. These techniques are using to gain the trust of people and they are explicitly against Google’s guidelines.
Cutts said, webmasters better check with the FTC guidelines if they are accepting compensation and they are unsure whether those compensations will be make the links paid or not.
These rules can clear a lot of confusion about the principles Google is adopting here but still they will leave lots of grey areas and it will boil down to Google’s ability to judge the links, paid or organic as manually judging those links is certainly not possible.