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The fire storm that got started when Matt Cutts made a simple call for webmasters to start submarining their competition with reports of paid links got me wondering. Is Google setting a trend here or following one?

History

Google has become the market leader by returning the most relevant search results. They’ve done this by reducing the effectiveness of methods used by webmasters to artificially improve their site’s ranking.

They’ve instituted several methods which are the norm today, but at its time was ground breaking and changed the industry, for instance:

• Use of links as a vote, and indication of content with anchor text.
• Devaluing of META keywords.
• Less dependence on content keyword density.
• Detection of link exchange schemes.
• Introduction of nofollow.
• Morphing of nofollow to mean 99 different things
• Detection of hidden text.

That’s by no means an exhaustive list, but one thing is for sure, they’ve always followed the trend, rather than set the curve. In other words, Google is a reactionary engine. In their continued efforts to be relevant they watch the spam-o-day methods and react to them. That’s not meant to be a knock on Google but rather an observation of the phenomenon. Google, as the leader, closes a loop hole, the spammers find another one, Google reacts.

Speculation

If only there was a tool available to allow me to watch and spot trends on the Internet. Oh wait, there is! Google Trends is another one of those perpetually beta programs offered by Google. After playing with it for a while, I came up with a query that fits my hypothesis nicely (neat how you can do that, props to Dan Rather). Trending the search terms: Link Exchange, Link Directories, Buy Links, and nofollow brings up some interesting lines. I was tempted to plot this against bugdaddy bigdaddy, but avoided that as it brought up a lot of irrelevant information regarding fathers and things that are not small.

Notice how as interest wanes in link exchanges and directories, and people consider the impact of nofollow, the searches for paid links pick up. My guess is that this assault on paid links is just the latest reaction to the most recent trend of manipulating the natural search results.

What’s going to replace Paid Links as that is rendered less and less effective? This is complicated by the fact that all the other spam methods didn’t make money for 3rd parties. People could hide text on their site for free, but a host of link sellers have popped up, some old and some new. It’s an economy based on the fact that its cheaper to buy links to get natural traffic than it is to buy traffic, and until that fact changes its going to thrive. Now it could be changed a few different ways, the links could be devalued, the natural traffic reduced, the cost of links increased, or the traffic prices could go down.

I personally think the large link networks will soon be rendered worthless and the link buyers will be driven back to the underground where they came from operating at a much smaller scale, and Google will move on to the next spam-o-day.