Don't Buy Link Rich Advertorials (Unless You're Google)

... in terms of comparing the current situation to the past incident of link buying by flower sites is that the last time Google claimed no corrective action was needed due to automatically detecting things. Though perhaps Interflora was a bit more aggressive than the other companies were.

...to overstate the impact of some things just because they are things we experience directly. (We see the world through the lens of our own experiences).

A small software firm that was crushed by Microsoft or a book publisher fearing for their survival based on Amazon's increasing leverage in their vertical view those companies the same way some small online publishers might view Google. I am a fan of Amazon & Microsoft (as I have experienced it) hasn't been bad either. But then I don't have the experience sets those other groups do.

I think Google initially did amazing things to flatten the market & allow smaller companies to compete with larger ones. Certainly they have been moving in the opposite direction ever since the mortgage fraud bubble collapsed & "brand" has been the answer for just about everything.

I'll admit that I was a bit surprised that they went after advertorials involving the mainstream media in the UK while the European anti-trust stuff is still ongoing. That in and of itself shows that Google is still willing to push back against powerful sources. I just think that they probably shouldn't have been buying advertorials when they decided to torch them.

If you look at any of the most competitive online verticals where the leaders are online-only, many of the leading brands of today were aggressive link buyers of years gone by (that had largely abandoned the technique after they became category default leaders). The issue with the hard & fast stuff is that almost every site has some crappy links & such as part of its profile. It's a hard game to balance...Google's utility goes down if everything is a free for all, but excessive FUD is likely just as destructive to many entities in the market (and thus to the market as a whole).

Another issue here is that Google has only scratched the surface with this advertorial stuff. There are thousands and thousands of other news sites doing the same stuff, though perhaps in a more tightly integrated & less overt way. If Google pushes too hard on the media they may create enough of a backlash that they ultimately create a market opening for Bing. I am sure if this story spreads out of the SEO bubble Microsoft will be looking on with interest, however this story has mostly been something of/for/by the SEO industry ... there has been very little coverage outside of our little bubble. Other newspapers may not want to cover the advertorial issue for fear of shining the bring light on the advertorials in their own back yards.

> Google needs to accept this reality, and let the market play itself out.

I believe Google has already accepted a much starker reality: the whole search business is heading down a cul-de-sac, and all they can do is skim it off as much as possible before it implodes; and then move on to being a major industrial/technological company (cue Google Glass and self-driven cars).

Google's original success was down to a fluke. They found the ONLY already existing large-scale social space in capitalist history not (or at least not much) tainted by self-interest and manipulation, i.e. 1990s internet. You'll never gonna see an opportunity like that again.

That internet was a "sterile" playground for their equations and algorithms to do their magic, and establish Google as a powerful, phenomenally rich and almost universally admired company.

Then the world cottoned on to what a huge profit potential is at stake. Self-interest, greed and manipulation began its work in earnest, so, to quote you, "natural links" have all but disappeared from the web.

Ever since then, for all its boastful claims, Google is waging a losing war in terms of SERP quality. They stay popular mostly thanks to user inertia and self-perpetuating market power (aided by the incompetence of the competition), and not so much thanks to amazing engineering.

Their focus on brands might be construed as a purely money-grabbing turn, but it's at least as much an implicit admission of defeat. By living up to their originally touted "democratic" ideals they could no longer keep up with those outside players who were trying to extract the value from the search ecosystem they created (for simplicity's sake, one might call them spammers).

No matter how many smart engineers they employ, the world's overall creativity in finding the loopholes is, and will always be, too much for any single company to fend off.

Now they could have let the market play itself out like you suggest, but in all probability, that would not have been a pleasant prospect for mom-and-pops, either. They simply decided (like you and I would also decide in their place) that if this cannot be kept a clean playground any more, at least they should be the bullies profiting from it, and not someone else.

What we see in recent years is this playing out.

On the surface, Google's never had it so good, with profits and share price through the roof. But they know all too well that resentment is growing on multiple fronts, and sooner or later too many forces will turn against them. The problem for Google, and possibly for all who have a stake in a functional and reasonably fair search ecosystem, is that there is no way out of this downward spiral (see earlier paragraph starting with "No matter...").

So I think what we're gonna experience in the next couple of years is increasingly aggressive, cynical and unscrupulous behavior from Google within the search space, as they know the beginning of the end is already here and they must grab what they can while they can (that is, before toughening regulation and anti-Google sentiment reaching a critical mass drags them down too much).

Where most companies think ahead one or two steps, they have always been one to think ten steps ahead, and I feel that even by the end of this decade they see themselves mostly out of search and predominantly into cutting-edge everyday technology. (Of course, they might maintain their involvement in search for the lack of real competition, as a relatively easy additional source of profit, but definitely not as a priority.)

All in all, I'm afraid we're heading towards the dark ages following the fall of the Roman empire in terms of search. In such times the weak lose out, which is in this case small business.

I have personally boringly blogged about it before but the reality is that the "Do no evil mantra" of Google died when they became a publicly listed company. Legally! they have to do all in their power to drive the share price up.

Google's early research admonished ad-driven search engines, so the bait-n-switch stuff started long before going public did.

Some very smart psychologists have studied the actions of "publicly listed companies" and quite frankly if they were human they would be "socio-paths".

Robert Hare wrote Psychopathy Checklist, Revised (PCL-R). He also stated “I should have never done all my research in prisons. I should have spent my time inside the Stock Exchange as well. Serial killers ruin families. Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.” then went on to co-author Snakes in Suits.

Once companies reach a certain size and get listed all they are interested in is survival and to survive in the reality that is the modern share market they have to keep driving share price up. If the share price stays stable, then the company is considered dead in the water and its shares are not traded as much.

Remember when you buy shares you generally want the price to go up, so you can sell them for a profit. Of course there are other factors like derivatives etc. However generally a stock must increase its value, ethically if possible. However, if that gets hard going then as any self respecting socio-path will, the company must go into to self preservation mode. Remembering that self preservation for a socio-path is not like self preservation for you and me. For a socio-path to feel like they are surviving they must be winning!

Growth creates a glow, a halo effect in terms of press coverage & retaining employees. Think of all the "is dead" coverage Microsoft has received over the past 13 years while performing roughly inline with the Nasdaq AND returned $194 billion to shareholders via dividends and stock buyback since Ballmer has become CEO.

in this latest round Google has struck pretty close to home. Search Engine Land and many other SEO blogs rely on guest blogging and quite often those guest posts are offered only because they get a link back. As Danny himself recently blogged Search Engine Land might end up getting caught out in this way as Google should get caught out in the above example by Aaron.

I disagree with Danny being worried about this issue impacting him adversely, as he was the one who brought up his own site's issues.

with every update more and more, the winner appears to be Google or more to the point Google properties like YouTube.

Did you catch the comment from Jason Calacanis about how they are a funded YouTube partner now (just like Demand Media)?

According to Google, these sites directly deserve to be penalized for shallow low-quality content, but then Google pre-funds those same companies uploading videos to YouTube. :D

My final comment to Danny in that argument was something to the effect "you only say those things because Google is not competing in your space! wait until they decide to enter the SEO business". Of course I was being a bit tongue in cheek with that. however you can see with his last post that he is a little worried because although Google is not fighting in his market they are certainly affecting the way Search Engine Land will have to do business in the future. They will have to nofollow all links in their advertorials... oops sorry "guest posts" and risk that no one will bother offering them content for "free", or risk a penalty from google!

Again, I don't think it helps to focus on that issue with Danny, as he was the one who brought up the direct links to advertisers. And I think you are sort of merging 2 different things ... guest columnists vs the advertisers offering whitepapers on Digital Marketing Depot. I believe the accidental paid links he brought up were on Digital Marketing Depot. Columnists will not have credit stripped for writing, as there is nothing wrong with giving them credit for what they create.

...create a parody blog of a Google executive that is hosted by a Google-owned service? It's not like they would... oops.

... creative in that post?

Almost all of that stuff is rehashed stuff from about a decade ago. And then here you guys are talking about don't ruin the industry with email outreach
koozai.com/blog/search-marketing/how-one-bad-email-can-take-down-an-entire-industry/
marginally relevant comment drops aren't particularly inspiring. It is that same sort of stuff you guys are warning against.