New Article - The First SEO Republic Forumed

[thejenn]

Full Text: http://www.searchengineguide.com/hedger/005423.html

Some Snippets:

Like thousands of other SEO practitioners, I have been quietly monitoring a raging debate that has crossed several SEO/SEM related forums over the past week.

[tearles]

I assume the technique described in detail in this post is part of the "raging debate" described in the article:

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/20...ngine_s_2.html

I'm intrigued by the technique because I imagine I could find high page rank sites, like oreilly.com even, that are relevant *enough* to my business that I could probably sleep at night purchasing advertising on them solely to raise my page rank rather than generate clicks. At least, my relevance would be far better than that for Cuban cigars, as quoted in the post.

My problem with it is that when Google chooses to do something about the Cuban cigar irrelevants, I may be caught up in their 'solution.' For instance, if they choose to blacklist users of these types of link ads, like I understand they do for users of link farms, that would kill me.

I guess for now, I'll try to find some other way to spend my gobs of marketing budget.

tracy

[Robert]

There is nothing wrong with buying links, but I wouldn't keep any that didn't drive traffic to my site or act as a branding tool.

[tearles]

The theory of buying advertising on unrelated, but highly ranked, websites is that you are unlikely to get clicks from the ad, but you are likely to raise your organic search performance, thereby driving traffic to your site. The search results improvement happens because Google values links to your site from highly ranked sites.

I've heard statistics that state that on any given search, consumers will click through an search result 70% of the time and a sponsored result 30% of the time. (If anyone has better information, please let me know.) If this is true, then being one of the top few results on organic search is significantly more valuable than being in the top few sponsored positions.

In our case, through our own optimization efforts we were able to raise our search results placement to number two or three on one or two key search phrases. That has since slipped to about number five in the neverending optimization arms race. For other search terms, that performance is significantly lower. Purchasing ads on these unrelated, but highly ranked, sites could be another tool to boost that performance.

[Robert]

Originally Posted by tearles

The theory of buying advertising on unrelated, but highly ranked, websites is that you are unlikely to get clicks from the ad, but you are likely to raise your organic search performance, thereby driving traffic to your site.

Instead of unrelated sites, a better approach is buying advertising on highly ranked sites relevent to your target audience. This way you do get clicks in addition to other benefits.

[Logan]

I think there is some difficultly from an seo standpoint in defining what 'related' exactly means. For example are golf balls related to weddings if you sell them as groomsmen or wedding reception gifts? People say related, and only the search engines themselves know what this means. I think we give the search engines too much credit.

To add on to Roberts proposed solution, I suggest also that the relevant site you pay on shouldn't not have irrelevant links on it (even if it is relevant to you) I'd be a bit careful not to get 'caught up in the solution' as tearles mentions by making sure this is the case.

There is nothing wrong with paying for links on relevant sites that only have relevant content and links on it.