It’s no big secret that the internet is big business. Indeed, any company that expects to experience any level of success in this day and age must have a fantastic online presence to drive business. A key part of a successful online strategy involves making sure that it’s your site that appears towards the top, or preferably, at the top of relevant internet searches.
Companies now got to great lengths to ensure that their sites are amongst the top search results in their field. Indeed, there is now an entire industry of companies dedicated to helping other companies in this pursuit.
To understand how this all works and how paid links fit in to the bigger picture, it’s necessary to have a quick look at the history of the web and online search
THE HISTORY
Although it seems difficult to believe now, there was a time in the history of the Internet when Google didn’t exist. If we turn back the clocks to the mid 90s when the internet was just starting to take hold in business and homes, there was a whole gamut of search sites offering a service that, to the average end user at least, seemed to be offering a service very similar to what we see when we Google today. However, underneath the hood, these search engines were rather primitive, mainly ranking results on how often your search term was featured on any particular site. This was an easy system for the eager or unscrupulous to exploit. As such, the results that were at the top of your search results, weren’t necessarily the best sites for your needs.
All this changed when Google came along. Their founders had the revolutionary idea that a website should be ranked not just on the frequency of the search results in its content but also on how many other sites linked to it (and also the quality of those sites). This totally moved the goalposts in terms of internet search, and Google quickly established itself as far and away the market leader in web search in the late 90s to early 2000s, a position it still holds today.
THE ERA OF PAID LINKS BEGINS
Companies and webmasters weren’t oblivious to this new trend and quickly started looking at ways to boost their chances of getting themselves to the top of Google’s search results. The savvy amongst them realised that if they could artificially boost the number of sites that linked to theirs, it would inflate their Google ranking. The quick way to persuade people to do this was to pay them to link to their site. Thus the age of paid links began.
In turn, Google was aware of this new trend and, accordingly, incorporated new algorithms into their page ranking system to take into account paid links. Today, Google does not disallow paid links, but they do require that they are flagged as such. It is strongly opposed to websites that try to present paid links as ‘legitimate’, ‘natural’ links. Any website found doing this suffers an extremely severe hit to its Google ranking (http://www.tizish.com/what-are-paid-links-and-how-they-affect-your-seo/).
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION
Alongside the paid links phenomenon exists the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) industry in which a company such as http://www.seobrighton.com/, for example, is employed to boost a company’s Google ranking by ‘natural’ means. This is usually achieved by creating genuine web content that contains links to the company’s site within a valid context. SEO is a huge industry now, with one source suggesting that by the end of 2012 it was mentioned on over 900 million different websites (http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/21/how-big-is-the-search-engine-optimization-industry-infographic/).
THE FUTURE
We’ve seen how paid links work and that they are an acceptable way of boosting Google ranking, as long as they are declared as such. Google itself gives extensive instructions to web users on the do’s and don’ts of paid links (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en). One thing seems certain: paid links (alongside SEO) are likely to continue to play an absolutely crucial role as the web gains yet further prominence and importance in the world of business and commerce.