The Future of Paid Linking

Paid linking… Ever since Google’s current batch of visible PageRank updates, it’s been the topic on each blogger’s mind. Sure, paid linking a great way to monetize a website, but is it worth the risk? What will become of those who defy the Google gods and continue to sell popularity? After the smoke clears, what sort of brave new blogosphere will remain? Here are some predictions.

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Google will continue on the warpath against paid linking. This shouldn’t come as any surprise, since it’s obvious that paid linking is a massive threat to Google. It undermines the quality of organic search and takes money away from Google’s own online advertising and website monetization products, AdWords and AdSense. It’s in Google’s ideal interest to keep fighting it. Their terminator, Googlebot, will only get smarter and more efficient as time goes by, eventually hunting down and penalizing any website that shows the slightest hint of paid linking.

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Paid linking will go further underground. No matter how many penalties are assessed, bloggers who crave income won’t be satisfied with AdSense. They’ll hide their paid links within posts, brokering them behind the scenes and blending them seamlessly with ordinary content. This is already happening, so it’s more fact than prediction, but the practice will become much more pronounced. Googlebot will, of course, have great difficulty separating these mixed paid links from their non-paid counterparts. In adapting to the new, signal-less environment, it will mistakenly penalize innocent websites, resulting in a backlash from webmasters that will prompt Google to ease off of its offensive.

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PageRank will become meaningless. In Google’s attempts to kill paid linking by making PageRank an unreliable measure of link value, PageRank will be the ultimate casualty. Bloggers and entrepreneurs will sense the growing discontent and develop third celebration measurements to take its place. Eventually, PageRank will be looked down upon as inaccurate, uninformative, and frequently out-of-date, as it always should have been.

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Google will demolish trust between link buyers and sellers. Just after the paid linking community thinks is has won a small reprieve, Google will unleash a secret counterattack in the form of voluntary disavowal of links (as they’ve already hinted). Within Google Webmaster Tools, a new utility will be developed that will allow webmasters to remove their own outbound links from ranking calculations, all without ever using rel=”nofollow”. Link buyers will no longer be able to trust that link sellers aren’t cashing in without providing value. Short of adding an unenforceable “You will not disavow paid links” clause to link brokerage agreements, all trust in paid linking as a useful SEO method will be lost.

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In the end, Google will emerge victorious. On the internet advertising will continue and thrive as it always has, and some bloggers may be able to use traffic-based advertising for monetization. For the most part, however, paid linking will be reduced to a shadow of its former self. With the value of paid linking for ranking purposes being next to nothing, paid posting and paid directories will also take a hit. Dejected and crestfallen, bloggers will turn to other methods of blog monetization.

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What do you think? Are these predictions accurate? What kind of a future should we anticipate for paid linking?\n

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