Today, I received an email newsletter from Text Link Ads, part of which read,
If you are ready for an ad that can drive traffic and raise your natural search engine rankings head on over to TLA now
If I ran a search engine and I was aiming to deliver the most relevant results to my users then I’d also be concerned about people trying to take advantage of the careful developed ranking algorithms I’d put in place.
Whilst some websites using paid links might deserve a rankings boost i.e. they’re relevant for user search terms, but perhaps don’t yet have enough back-links to lift them into the limelight of the first three pages, paid links allow any website with a marketing budget to get those improvements regardless of whether or not they’re deserved.
Back-links are a handy natural voting system. Using back-links as votes may not be the perfect voting system, but it’s very effective. Is paying for votes any more ethical on the Internet than it is in the real world?
Technorati Tags: Paid links, Google, Yahoo!, MSN, TLA
