On February 12th, the NY Times broke a story regarding JC Penney and the use of paid linking to improve search engine rankings for a set of competitive keywords related directly to sales on their website during the 2010 holiday season. The scale of this link campaign was in the thousands of links from low authority and low relevance websites. The results were #1 rankings for many of the keywords that were targeted. This was one of the largest reported “link schemes” to be identified.
Paid linking is in direct violation of Google’s terms of service and is grounds for corrective action. Google reserves the right to manually change ranked pages as well as to update its algorithm to automatically change rankings by removing the links in question from the site’s back link profile. In the case of JC Penney, Google has stated that they manually changed the rankings and one can speculate they also updated their algorithm as well to identify existing and prevent future link schemes.
In light of Google’s publicly stated initiatives to fight web spam, the use of paid linking is becoming an ever-increasing risky proposition. There will be websites that can and will accept the risk in order to achieve short-term gain. Many of these websites are launched for the sole purpose of ranking for a specific keyword phrase with the intent to sell advertising or leads. It is not a major loss for them to lose rankings when they can switch their efforts to another domain. Brands do not have this luxury. They spend a huge amount of time and money building their brand awareness, partnerships, and authority in order to accomplish their business objectives.
RBM takes risk to client brand and website performance very seriously when developing strategies for building links. After all, links are a primary factor in a site’s reputation and authority, which translates into the ability to rank within natural search results. We leverage all resources available to build quality links that align with our overall SEO strategy and do not place our clients in a risky situation. This includes client websites, partners, media and press contacts, social media, and outreach to relevant websites. We abide by the basic rule of SEO: Create great content and tell people about it. While the execution of this rule is not always simple – it is the foundation for how we think about promoting our clients’ brand, products, and services.
