Paid Links Are Still Dominating Google Search Results - SEO Case Study

I recently read the article in Forbes (online October 7th, 2007) titled, “Google Purges Payolla” . As a SEO consultant, I was curious as to the continued effectiveness of paid links. I found a perfect case study with a company called “Bankruptcy Home” (www.bankruptcyhome.c*m). registered backlinks for Bankruptcy Home shows over 900 backlinks in Google and over 120,000 backlinks Yahoo. These are very respectable numbers and can easily justify the top organic keyword rankings related to bankruptcy for Bankruptcy Home. However, further investigation finds that a large portion of these backlinks have been created by utilizing classic “paid link” or “sponsored link” techniques. For example, Google and Yahoo currently credit Bankruptcy Home with back links from the following sources: The Charleston Gazette, Times Record News (Wichita Falls News). The paid links are always found near the bottom of the page for these online newspapers with a 30 to 40 character text hyperlink. A simple keyword phrase unrelated to the other content on the page is repeatedly placed on the online newspapers website. The power of this strategy comes from various factors:

(1) Paid links “bleed” ranking factor from these power web pages to the targeted url.

(2) Each day’s publication becomes a new set of paid links creating a tidal wave of backlink volume and off page ranking factor.

Examples of the ranking results to Bankruptcy Home (www.bankruptcyhome.c*m) from using paid links can be seen in its high ranking for extremely competitive keywords:

(1)Bankruptcy - Ranked 5 out of 83,500,000 competition in Google

(2)Bankruptcy - Ranked 8 out of 82,000,000 competition in Yahoo

(3)Bankruptcy Attorney - Ranked 1 out of 19,100,000 Competition in Google

(4)Bankruptcy Attorney - Ranked 6 out of 18,600,000 Competition in Yahoo

An example of the paid backlinks indexed in Google and Yahoo can be seen in the following hyperlinks:

(1)Google - http://www.wvgazette.com/section/News/2007102223

(2)Yahoo - http://sundaygazettemail.com/section/News/2007061911

This seems to prove that paid links continue to be highly successful in ranking for competitive keywords. It is also obvious that the major search engines are constantly “tweaking” their rules to ensure the best quality, relevant and natural results. The gray area between optimization and manipulation continues hang over these rules. Of course, when there are large dollars available in a market, these problems will only be intensified as web site owners looks at the risk / reward scale. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out over the next 12 months as the search engines attempt to update their rankings by automatically filtering out the use of paid links.