Advertising is obviously a great revenue source for successful blog such as Marketing Pilgrim by Andy Beal. However, if you are going to advertise on your blog you should probably consider the types of advertisements that are going to be shown. Andy Beal has a good reputation as being a good online marketer, he as active speaker at conferences, has his own clients, and developer his own reputation management software (in addition to writing a book). Now, you would think that someone in Andy’s position would be a bit more prudent in his blog advertisements. I say this because on the Marketing Pilgrim page there is an add promoting text link brokers, which is a service that let’s you buy links in hopes of increase your search engine rankings artificially.
According to Google paid linking is a violation of their terms:
“Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:
- Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the <a> tag
- Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file”
Paid linking is an artificial way to increase your page rankings. Google does allow paid links for advertising but those links must be designed in a way such that no page rank is passes from them, this means that your search engine rankings WILL NOT be artificially inflated. The ad on Andy Beal’s site blatantly suggests and offers paid links to help increase search engine rankings. As a marketing professional Andy should not be showing adds that make false claims to the users or ads that violate Google’s terms of service. Showing ads such as these decrease Andy’s credibility and now I’m beginning to wonder if Andy’s rankings have been inflated artificially with the use of paid links.
Most people that use the paid link services have no idea how Google calculates quality, most people have no idea how link value is passed, and most people have no idea how true SEO works. As someone who has been involved with SEO for several years I can say that most SEOs out there don’t even have a clue about SEO works, but this is a topic for another day.
Andy, as a fellow marketer I think it would be wise for you to remove that advertisement, it’s just not something that a marketing professional such as yourself should be touting on your site. Paid linking has harsh penalties when discovered.
What do you think? Should Andy remove the paid link add from his site?
Thanks for reading
Perhaps the bigger question is why is this worthy of a blog post–unless it’s just linkbaiting on your part. 😉
I don’t police the internet. Some marketers are willing to risk paid links, so it’s a choice they can make. Anyone that believes paid linking does not take place in SEO needs to get out more.
Feel free to update your post with the following statement from me. I do not use paid links for any of my sites nor any of my clients.
Cheers!
@andy
link baiting and paying for links are 2 different things though. i know you don’t police the internet but the advertisement is on your site nonetheless. i’m glad you don’t use paid links for yourself or your clients but surely you can understand why this question can come up, especially if the ad is on your site. do you think as a professional marketer you should be advertising a controversial service that may or may not ruin a person’s online site? i thought marketing folks like us exist to help people make better informed decisions about their marketing strategy.
thanks for commenting andy, glad you shared your opinion!
Glad to clear things up.
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