Yesterday I had the pleasure of speaking with my amiga Megan to a number of people in the insurance business about the ins and outs of SEO and PPC. While the time we had was nowhere near long enough to really get into much detail about anything, there was one section of the presentation that got me thinking…and it seems like Rand over at SEOmoz was thinking the same thing back on July 10th.

The topic, paid links.

You see, when I was discussing potential ways to get links to an insurance site I mentioned that buying paid links was:

1. Discouraged highly by Google
2. Risky (you could get banned)
3. Completely necessary for a site to rank for almost every highly-competitive, money making term on in the insurance vertical.

Rand’s post, which focuses on how Google seems to reward those people who purchase links, points out five glaring examples of this in multiple verticals. Rand also makes this oh-so-true statement about the challenges of building links to commercial content:

Thus, even if youre a white hat operator, and youre generating good, high quality content and links to that content, its going to be an incredible struggle to acquire links that point to your product pages or your sales landing page. The most you can hope for is to leverage your sites existing link weight and trust and point your internal links to those pages. When this fails to rank you, its only natural to turn to paid links - which everyone else and their dog is using.

Hearing someone like Rand rant about this should be an indicator to Google that they need to figure out a better way to deal with paid linking either in their guidelines or in their search results. (Rand is well know for his link baiting and link building skills, so if he is getting frustrated with the link building world, you know things are bad.)

These days, even if a company would be a perfect search result for a searcher, a lot of times they are forced to break Google’s paid linking rules just to have a chance in the Google natural results…and that doesn’t seem right.

It might be time for Google to loosen up on paid links but tighten up on the power of links coming from web pages that are considered off-topic. This could help clean up a lot of the paid links that appear on high PageRank pages that have off topic links in a “Sponsored Link” section, and help with the sitewide links on a lot of the media websites out there. At the same time it would allow paid link advertisers the ability to have a link on page that is relevant, that could drive them traffic, and yes, that could help them in the search rankings.

It seems pretty obvious that Google will never be able to find and remove every paid link that is out there. If they chance course now and start putting more focus on link relevance, they may be able to get their paid link hypocrisy problems sorted out sooner rather than later. This will not only help search marketers get back in line with Google’s guidelines, but will let Google free up resources to focus on improving search relevance…which from the looks of things lately, they could use.

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