Google Shows You Who is Willing to Sell You Quality Links Cheaply

Google recently added the ability for you to report link buyers, which is probably nothing more than a mind control game and a complete waste of time. I recently saw what looked like obvious link buying by Discovery.com. Do you think Google would do anything about it if I reported them? Nope.

Google also recently starting a phased launch of their position placement reports, which is far more beneficial to webmasters, as it shows what sites your AdSense ads are syndicated to. Most sites monetized via AdSense only make a fraction of their full potential, so sharing this data presents more arbitrage opportunities. How you can use this data to profit:

  • refine your AdSense ad buys to only target the best performing sites and pages

  • better learn who has your desired traffic stream and create things that appeal to their ego / belief system / audience
  • buy custom ads direct from the best converting sites (including text links)
  • find out what pages on competing sites get the most traffic and see how easy it is to rank for the terms those pages target
  • survey a competing site's traffic profile to find out which entire sections or sub-sections you should duplicate
  • if a site is getting a lot of traffic but an exceptionally poor CTR, consider buying the site outright and better integrating the ads into the content
Published: June 13, 2007 by Aaron Wall in seo tools

Comments

Barry
June 13, 2007 - 7:45am

I don't think Google has said they'll 'DO' anything about paid links, but they're trying to incorporate what you think paid link results are into their (or one) algos.

Brian Provost
June 13, 2007 - 9:12am

There is a lot of gold for arbitragers in the post...

Katinka Hesselink
June 13, 2007 - 10:47am

You mean my advertisers can see what pages of mine the ads are showing on - and how often? I'm not sure I want that...

Stu
June 13, 2007 - 11:17am

Finally google is doing something for the advertisers after 6 months of ripping us off with "Quality Scoring"

Wil Reynolds
June 13, 2007 - 12:21pm

Some excellent points Aaron! Thanks for sharing.
--Wil

Richard Ball
June 13, 2007 - 2:31pm

Do you think they'll ever add this kind of transparency for the AdSense for Domains traffic?

Ashley
June 13, 2007 - 2:53pm

Google may not have said they'll "do" anything about paid links, but let's be realistic - they'll use the data to tweak their algos in a way that people who bought links will suffer in the SERPS.

Why else would they want to know about paid links? I feel kinda torn on this point - sure it's great that they want to get useless sites out of the SERPs, but what about high quality sites with lots of competition that want to get themselves a bit extra link love? Especially links from legitimate, related sites. I don't know. I just don't see that as wrong.

As for the new info for AdSense - seems like it has huge potential to help people out. I'm curious to see how people utilize it.

JimC
June 13, 2007 - 3:59pm

Way to bring down the feed Aaron..;)

SEO
June 15, 2007 - 10:07am

I Dont thing so this kind of thing comes in market with that much transperancy of advertisers, does google used the same with google adsense and adwords?
http://www.evision.com.pk

Hummerbie
June 15, 2007 - 2:02pm

I think it is the next step for Google to get into Affliate based publishing with CPA.

You are now able to track sales and conversions picking the best performing websites per product.

Think off all those Adsense publishers becoming your affliate network promoting your products and you just pay per action... no clickfraud anymore..

Google is now able to pull this off overnight :-)
They have everything in place, form the publishers network to the checkout where the goods are sold.

Just wondering what percentage they would take from your commisions.

John
June 16, 2007 - 3:04am

I find it funny Google wants to ban paid links. They made it happen by making pagerank public. It would be a lot less paid links if they didn't.

Most links are sold per PR.

They have themselves to blame.

Ivonne
June 16, 2007 - 2:21pm

Hi, I am doing SEO course and contest is to get #1 Google by 22 June.

Yeah, if buy links, someone can win contest, but not fair. Making links take time. Build relationships.
When people are desperate for traffic, they get sucked into game of buying traffic, banner ads, buy links. I hate getting ads flashing on my screen when I am busy working!

BTW my blog is "ambatchmasterpublisher" dot blogspot com if you like to help! Search keyword (without quotation marks) in google and see our contest. Thanks :)

Christoph Cemper
June 17, 2007 - 11:18am

Impressive and Inspiring as usual Aaron - thanks!

christoph

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