Yeah, okay, fine. So, just like the rest of the world, you want to know about Google+.

Actually if you’re like most of us around here, one of the last things in the world you’d like to know about is Google+. One more aggravation, one more irritation, one more roadblock, one more impediment, one more — to put it like it really is — potential train wreck on the way to getting and maintaining a decent return position for your website.

Unfortunately, staying ignorant about Google+ is not an option. The inescapable truth is that Google is the big bad (or good, depending upon your current return position) guerrilla in the e-commerce neck of the woods and pretending to be deaf, dumb and blind about the gorilla’s latest products and strategies and algorithms and mental state can be exceedingly hazardous to the state of one’s financial health.

So let’s start by asking and attempting to answer a few questions about Google+? Is it eventually going to toss Facebook and Twitter under the bus the way it did Yahoo, Lycos , Northern Lights, MSM , etc. and ad nauseam ? Not a chance. Not this time.

Facebook in its own way is a phenom and in its own heavily fortified space in the cyber universe every bit as powerful as Google is in the world of search engines. Google+ has nothing to really challenge Facebook with and probably never will.

This state of affairs is undoubtedly depressing to Larry Page. Doubly depressing, when he was listening to the baying of all the witless financial analysts pretending to believe that the sky was falling because Google racked up a “mere” $2.9 billion in profits for Q4 2011. Disturbing as the facts may be to Mr. Page, however, facts are facts. Confronted with Facebook’s ascendancy during the latter half of the past century, Google — to sum up its reaction in three words — did a Yahoo.

As we all remember, Yahoo was fast asleep at the switch when Google started roaring down the line at the turn-of-the-century. Google, rather amazingly, was asleep at the exact same switch when Facebook began its move. Yahoo woke up way too late to contest Google for search engine supremacy and Google has awakened to late to seriously challenge Facebook. In both cases the battles had been waged and lost before the losers even realized they were in a fight.

Since nothing in the world of business is impossible, Google may somehow, someday be able to wrest the social networking crown from Facebook’s head. But from today’s vantage point, it’s hard to see how that could happen unless Facebook made some kind of catastrophic misstep. Something on the other of a massive security lapse that resulted in a few hundred million of its user profiles winding up on Wikileaks . Could happen, but it’s not likely.

Twitter, is another story. It has a tremendous network and a great deal of power. The political upheaval in Egypt that led to the ousting of Hosni Mubarak was largely coordinated via tweets between various geographically scattered groups of dissidents.

On the other hand, Twitter has very limited cash flow and earnings. Edison Research analyst Tom Webster’s description of Twitter as a “company that raises mountains of cash but makes less money than a twelve year-old with a paper route” is exaggerated but essentially true. Especially when Twitter’s financials are stacked next to Google’s and Facebook’s. And while venture capital is a beautiful thing, there inevitably comes a day when investors becoming exceedingly restless if the aren’t seeing any return on their investment. So Twitter, unless and until, it figures out a better way to monetize its service will to one extent or another be vulnerable to an attack from a determined adversary as well heeled as Google.

At the moment, Google’s strategy in the war between the social nets appears to be based mostly on coercion. Refuse to become a member of Google+ and you won’t be allowed to open a new Gmail account, for example. And if you decide to hold your breath waiting for Google to apply the same restriction to Picasa , Youtube , Google Talk, unlocked (i.e. non-telco provided) Android devices and other products you probably won’t suffocate if you manage to hang on until the March 1 imposition of Google’s new one size fits all user profile and privacy policy goes into effect.

Reprehensible or not, the current strategy has already, Google claims, harvested more 100 million Google+ members. Whether or not a substantial number of those shanghaied into signing up for Google+ ever use the service or even remember that they have an account on once signed up for it is an open question, but given the size of and growth rate of the user base Google+ is eventually going to be hosting billions of posts.

Which brings us to what, if this were a movie, could be titled “Nightmare in Menlo Park, Part 17: Google Search+Your World” (GS+ YW ), the successor to Google Social Search. Still in its infancy, GS+ YW seems, on its surface, benign enough. In fact, Google is e-papering the web with scores, if not hundreds, of pages telling us exactly how benign it is. How it is not an invasion of privacy. How it is easy to disable. How effectively you’ll be protected against having your posts turning up in global search returns.

To loosely paraphrase Shakespeare, it does appear to that Google may be overly protesting the assertion that GS+ YW may grow to be not quite as innocuous as claimed.

Theoretically, it works like this?

1. You log into your Google account to send an email or any one of a hundred other Googlie things. This automatically logs you into you Google+ account.

2. At some point or other you “Google” washing machines.

3. If anyone in your G+ circle has posted something about washing machines — say their love affair with a new Maytag — that post is returned as the first hit for your query.

Not so terrible, really, all the normal natural returns for washing machines lose only one return position. The possibility of the return positions get seriously tweaked by a dozen or more members of your circle writing washing machine posts at roughly the same time is slim to none.

The Catch 22 is a loophole called “public” posting. About which Google says:

Content in these (GS+ YW ) search results is public on the web. Public content may appear in the search results of ANYONE if it’s relevant to their search.

Now that special, isn’t it? Every Friday washing machine manufacturers and major vendors can give all their employees a 15 minute break open their Google+ accounts and tap out public post about washing machines.

What a lovely post-Christmas gift to all the webmasters who’ve sweated , struggled, and spent time and money to optimize their sites to appear somewhere on the first five or even 10 Google return pages. Give GS+ YW a year or so to shed its training wheels and all those return pages are likely to be buried behind multiple pages full of GS+ YW public posts.

Can operators of web-based small businesses do anything to mitigate or evade negative fallout from Google+ Your World? Probably. Since every action inevitably triggers a reaction, strategies to thwart GS+ YW will probably emerge once G+ emerges from gets the incubator and can be seen more clearly.

While we’re all waiting, we’d like to suggest that you put max effort into growing and strengthening your linking presence, preferably by taking advantage of LinksManager or ManagedLinkBuilding . Because whatever the post Google+ world holds, it’s pretty obvious that increasing your volume of non-search-engine based traffic is going to become more important than ever.

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How about that? Your sites, and ours, have made it through yet another economically tumultuous year.

It wasn’t easy, was it?

Like you, we’ve been working our butts off trying to block the hammer blows the recession keeps aiming at small businesses in general and entrepreneurs in particular. But here we are, still standing, bigger and better than ever. Thanks to you.

Hey, that’s worth repeating. Thanks to you. Thanks to all you subscribers who’ve stayed the course with us. Thanks to you guys and gals with the smarts to realize that cutting back on a site’s linking building campaign severely compromises its branding, marketing, and search-engine optimization efforts.

Which brings us to our New Year’s resolutions for 2012: We at LinksManager.com hereby resolve to make our world-class traffic-generating and branding solutions — LinksManager, ManagedLinkBuilding and LinkPartners — more powerful, more relevant, and more essential than ever before.

We also resolve to help your site “live long and prosper” (to steal a line from Star Trek), despite the paradigm shift in online marketing that will continue to rock the e-commerce world over the next 12 months.

Paradigm shift?

What’s that?

What it is, is this: A stupid, pretentious way of saying “sea change.” A sea change brought about by the fact that Facebook has, it claims, more than 800 million active members; more than half of whom (that’s 400 million people, people) log onto their Facebook account every day.

A sea change because Twitter ended 2011 with more than 300 million users generating approximately 300 million Tweets and 1.5 billion (as in BILLION) search queries a day.

A sea change that means marketing solely through a website without social-media support is rapidly becoming a non-option for many kinds of small and medium sized businesses.

A sea change that compelled us to give birth to ManagedSocialMedia.com, a true New Year’s baby that’s scheduled to go live on January 1, 2012.

If you’re just beginning to consider transitioning from marketing exclusively via web links to marketing via web links and social-networking sites, ManagedSocialMedia will ease that transition by taking the brain-draining, time-consuming task of creating Tweets and Wall posts off your hands.

If, on the other hand, you’ve been tweeting and posting to your wall long enough to be suffering social-network burnout, ManagedSocialMedia’s America-based professional posters can supply the creative sparks needed to generate social-media postings that turn casual visitors into followers … and customers.

Like its brother, ManagedLinkBuilding.com, ManagedSocialMedia is a true turnkey solution for creating customized social-network content unique to your Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Custom social-network content highly relevant to your business.

Custom social-network content optimized to take advantage of the search engines’ latest ranking algorithms for Twitter and Facebook.

2012. Here it is. Like every new year, it arrives fraught with perilous pitfalls and bristling with golden opportunities. It also arrives at a time when the Googlecentric world we have all lived in for more than half a decade is being besieged by the rise of social networks, federal regulators, and even Microsoft, whose Bing search engine – according to many analysts — is now snatching over 30 percent of search queries.

How will Googliath respond to these attacks? Will “instant search” be enough to vanquish Bing? Will Google’s high-powered legal team diffuse monopoly and restraint of trade allegations? Will Google+ seriously challenge Facebook or will it become Google- in less time than it took Google Buzz to become Google Silent?

Good questions. Like you, we anxiously await the answers.

In the meantime, to quote from Abraham Lincoln, “Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other.”

Happy New Year to you all! We know you have a choice when it comes to who you use for Link Management (and now Social Media Management). We look forward to surpassing your expectations in the months and years ahead!

From the entire LinksManager Team,
Kindest Regards,
Joel Lesser, President, CEO
Creative NetVentures, Inc.
LinksManager LLC
ManagedSocialMedia.com (coming in January 2012)

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“What do you say to those who argue that there is a fundamental conflict of interest between only providing unbiased web links and now providing answers, when you own many of the services providing the answers. As a rational business trying to make the most profit, why wouldn’t we expect Google to favor its own products and services in providing these answers?”
Senator Herb Kohl to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, during a September 21 hearing before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy & Consumer Rights

“I’m not sure Google is a rational business trying to maximize its own profits …”
Eric Schmidt replying to Senator Kohl

Google Crushes Estimates, Stock Soars …
Wall Street Journal headline Oct 13

Rational business or not, it can hardly be argued that Google is failing to maximize its profits. Despite declining or, at best, flat-line economic results from virtually all other major online and offline information services companies, Google’s Q3 returns shattered both analysts’ projections and its own records.

With total quarterly revenues of nearly $10 billion, up 30 percent over Q3 2010, a net income of $3.18 billion, per share earnings of $8.33 compared to a mere $6.72 12 months earlier and more than $46 billion in “cash, cash equivalents and marketable short-term securities” jingling in its pocket, Google established personal bests across the board.

Or, as the WSJ put it, “Google took high expectations for its third-quarter earnings season and beat them like they owed Google money … Wall Street analysts have been beaten into submission, the 40 or so of them that cover Google lining up in single file to kiss the ring.”

Which is not to imply that Mr. Schmidt was blowing smoke through the halls of Congress when he said he wasn’t “sure” whether Google was trying to maximize its own profits. Maybe Google is making all that money without really trying.

Maybe it just happened. Sort of like a pig happily rooting around for truffles suddenly finding himself soaring over the tree tops without as much as having flapped an ear.

How rational Google is and how hard it squeezes and pulls its cash cows’ nipples to extract the last dime isn’t anyone else’s business. Not yours. Not ours. Not the Senate’s. What is our business – and Uncle Sam’s – is whether or not Google is illegally restraining trade by stacking its returns deck to favor its own interests over that of the public and the rest of the e-commerce community.

In the end, after all the antitrust hearings are held, the evidence sifted, the reports issued and the legal charges, if any, filed, the answer to the question of whether Google is or is not cheating will be based on one thing: links and how those links are managed.

Exchange links, one-way links, two-way links, free links, paid links, deep links, reciprocal links, back links, forward links, oblique links and any other kind of link we may have forgotten.

Why are links the most crucial element in evaluating whether or not Google is or isn’t guilty of engaging in antitrust and anti-competitive practices? It’s because linking is the throbbing money-generating engine that drives the whole company. Sure, today’s Google has its diamond-encrusted beak, fingers and toes in all kinds of pots in all corners of the world … far beyond the world, if you consider Big G’s position as number one or two (depending on what measuring stick you use) as a cloud computing host.

But despite all those peripheral businesses and their profits and losses (yeah, even Google has a few “assets” in the red), if you slice a big chunk of bloody meat out of Google’s heart and send it to a DNA lab you will get an unequivocal six-word report: This beast is a link machine.

A link machine. You type a query into a search box which links you to Google and Google provides you with a few hundred, thousand or million of links to other sites.

Here at LinksManager we have something (aside from our birth year) in common with Google. If you cut us, we too will bleed links. Our DNA is exactly the same as theirs. Like Google, we earn our living from linking. So we are, naturally, hyper-interested in the answer to Senator Kohl’s question. Does Google unfairly steer end users toward its own sites and away from its competitors?

Perhaps, after spending millions of dollars and countless FBI person hours on its investigation, the Committee will come up with a different verdict than ours. Perhaps they will uncover evidence invisible to the naked eye.

But you know something, we just did our own zero-cost, totally non-scientific investigation of this issue and after carefully analyzing all the evidence have come to an inescapable conclusion. One that will undoubtedly startle many regular readers of this blog: Googliath is NOT guilty.

– Item 1: A search for “online photo album” returned Google’s Picasa fourth behind, among others, arch enemy Yahoo’s Flickr.

– Item 2: A search for “online books” didn’t show Google Books anywhere in the first three pages.

– Item 3: In a search for “cloud computing hosts,” Google was nowhere on the first handful of return pages. Major competitor Amazon returned number three.

– Item 4: A search for “web advertising service agencies” showed Google’s DoubleClick, by far the largest, highest profile company in that industry, behind two much smaller, insignificant companies.

And, finally, the one conclusive bit of evidence that no one on the jury, Senator or not, can dare ignore.

– Item 5: We Googled “web search engines.” All four CPU cores instantly shot up and over Core Temps’ red scale. Lights flickered on and off throughout a three-county area. Traffic ground to a halt on I-90 as dozens of previously navigable potholes suddenly and mysteriously widened into gaping craters. Finally, after what seemed like an interminable wait (”Hey, can somebody check if Time Warner is down AGAIN?”) we got a return page.

And there it was, clean and clear. Number 1: mamma.com (mamma.com????) Number 2: A Wikipedia article. Number 3: Dogpile. Number 4: Bing (Yes, that Bing). Number 5: WebCrawler. Number 6: Yahoo.

And where was Google.com in the returns for “web search engines?” Nowhere. Well, probably not really nowhere, exactly. It must be in there somewhere, we just gave up looking at five or six pages.

Forget all the other evidence. This is the only exhibit that matters. Microsoft’s Bing and Yahoo’s Yahoo both return 40, 50 or a couple of hundred positions higher than Google on a Google search for “web search engines.”

Case dismissed. Get your butt out of the courtroom Mr. Schmidt, we’ve got some VIP parking meter scofflaws we need to deal with.

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Let’s take those four items in order, starting with a quote from Web Strategist Cyrus Sheppard.

I understand the temptation. We can’t escape it. Google even tells us to plaster ads all over our site. But the AdWords Team is separate from the spam team lead by Matt Cutts. Don’t expect them to both give the same advice.

A great quote that one, though we do take a bit of exception to Mr. Shepard’s last word. Not that Google doesn’t give advice, because it does. Between Matt’s must-read blog, the Webmaster Help Center, and numerous other blogs and forums, Google actually does provide a lot more advice – good, bad and inscrutable – than most webmasters realize.

What is different in this case is that while the AdWords team advises, Matt Cutts’ spam team, penalizes.

Here’s an example of some actual Adwords/Adsense Team advice:

After noting that certain areas on a “typical” web page “tend to be more successful than others” in generating ad hits, they say:

“This ‘heat map’ illustrates the ideal placing on a sample page layout. The colors fade from dark orange (strongest performance) to light yellow (weakest performance). All other things being equal, ads located above the fold tend to perform better than those below the fold. Ads placed near rich content and navigational aids usually do well because users are focused on those areas of a page.”

Indeed. Note how the best places for placing ads surround and almost suffocate the page’s “primary content.” More importantly, note the relationship between the amount of real estate Google’s “heat map” artists allocated to content and the amount they allocated to ads.

To recap, the above advice is direct from the horse’s mouth.

Unfortunately for webmasters, Google’s steed is two headed. One of those heads, the one we just quoted, belongs to the “monetizers” in the AdWords/Adsense departments. The other head belongs to the purists over at the page ranking and algorithm tweaking labs.

As you might expect, what comes out of that head’s mouth is substantially different.

In a Google Webmaster Central post about PageRank, THAT horse’s mouth said that Google’s algorithms – especially the

relatively new Panda algo — are “aimed at helping people find high-quality sites by reducing the rankings of (sites with) low-quality content.”

One of the ways the Cutts Crew defines sites with “low-quality” content?

They have pages with “an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content.“

Bottomline line is this: According to the Google marketing department you need a lot of ads placed cheek-to-jowl with your best content to maximize your returns. The Catch 22 is that taking that advice may result in the Google ranking department devaluing your site so you get fewer site visitors to potentially click on all those ads.

So what we have here is a classic vicious circle. A vicious, return-position eroding circle that has trapped thousands of webmasters with Google search-ad-heavy pages since the Panda deployment.

“Vicious” and “trapped webmasters” are also perfect descriptors of click fraud.
Google, citing a vaguely defined four-stage firewall intended to protect webmasters from being charged for fraudulent clicks, claims that less than 2 percent of AdWords Clicks are fraudulent. Independent researchers and forensic analysts within the industry and university internet research labs peg the 2010 rate at between 17 and 29 percent. A U.K. marketing company whose lawsuit against Google has been wending its way through the courts for several years alleges the actual rate, at least in Europe, is about 40 percent.

One thing virtually every expert except those on the Google payroll seem to agree on is this: Click fraud has been and is increasing in geometric proportion to the proliferation of “botnets,” automated networks of hundreds or thousands of PCs programmed to generate clicks on websites set up to solely to display click-through ads for the botnets to plunder.

What does this mean to a typical small-business website? Here’s a very recent example from one of our subscribers.

“We bought about ten AdWords keywords and the average user session from those clicks was two seconds. Our average user session from organic search hits is more than five minutes and the average user session from our link-partner hits is over ten minutes. Two seconds can only mean click fraud, they ripped us off for about $1,000 in six weeks.”

How, you might ask, could this scenario have possibly played out? Google says it analyzes “all clicks” using “automated algorithms which filter out invalid clicks in real time,” how could such sophisticated examples of artificial lack of intelligence not notice that hundreds of two-second sessions could only be generated by an automated fraudster?

Don’t ask us, we can’t explain how or why anything involving Google works or doesn’t work.

We can however, make a comment.

According to most credible reporting services, global search advertising sales reached a record $40-something billion dollars in 2010. And Google, depending on which “informed source” you believe, banked 75 to 93 percent of that total.

Being conservative and figuring Google’s take as 75 percent of $40 billion, Google’s 2010 revenue from search ads was $30 billion. Setting the fraud rate at only 5 percent, much closer to Google’s claimed 2 percent than everyone else’s 17 to 40 percent, makes Google’s annual cut of the total click fraud market $1.5 billion.

Here’s the “economics rules” part. Your AdWords campaign may be for Shinola because of immutable forces beyond the control of Google or anyone else.

Once upon a time, before Google and LinksManager, before Tim Berners-Lee created HTML and the University of Illinois Mosaic team developed the browser technology we all live by today, a Georgia maverick named Dennis Hayes invented a new type of telephone modem.

Using Hayes’ relatively inexpensive modem, anyone with a computer and phone line could connect and exchange files with anyone else who happened to have a Hayes-compatible modem, a computer and a phone line. The fact that the same tasks could have been done faster and with far less tedium with a simple Ham radio transceiver didn’t matter. Radios were old tech and computers were new.

So that, children, is how it all began. Primitive PCs directly communicating with each other remotely.

Free enterprise being what it is, it wasn’t long before entrepreneurs – like the tax gurus at H&R Block, who established CompuServe to generate income from under-utilized servers during their May-December off-season — recognized the earnings potential in selling access to a central database full of all kinds of otherwise inaccessible information.

Even more insightful visionaries dreamed of a day when Joe and Jane taxpayer, who, after all, had paid the Pentagon to develop the system, could “visit” this thing called the Internet and find something useful to read when they got there.

And so it came to pass that Hayes’ modems and AT&T’s copper wires, Berners-Lee’s newborn Web technology and primitive seek-and-find applications like Archie, Gopher and JumpStation combined to produce a minor miracle of empowerment. They gave “everyman” the power to post his hopes, dreams and flames on a central computer for the whole world to read.

There was also a major miracle. The creation of the most democratic communications medium in history. Nothing like it had ever existed before, nothing like it exists now, and it is unlikely that anything like it will ever exist again.

At 300 baud, roughly 100 or 200 or 400 (the math is really tough for the arithmetically challenged) times slower than today’s virtually obsolete 56K dial-up modems, those early Hayes-compatible devices had roughly the same data transmission capabilities as circa-1850 telegraph wires … maybe 30 or 40 minimally formatted words per minute.

But that was all right because the prehistoric web really couldn’t handle much besides raw words anyway. And Archie, Gopher, Gopher’s twin children Veronica and Jughead, and all the rest of the era’s so-called search engines were basically limited to compiling lists of file names and maybe a brief description of a site’s contents.

Which stood the old cliché – freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one – on its head.

With the infant web, anyone with a few hundred bucks could have their own virtual press. Even better, the web invalidated the other part of the cliché, which goes something like this: He who has the fastest and best press wins.

On the web, back then, all the “presses” were equally slow and pretty much limited to displaying black words on gray backgrounds. Adding colors, graphics, popups, etc. etc. etc. to pages was the stuff of dreams. Short of spelling everything right, there was essentially no way to make one site look better than another, even the typeface of all the black words on all the gray backgrounds was determined by the end-user’s browser, not the webmaster.

Better yet, from an egalitarian point of view, there was absolutely no way to SEO sites for the aboriginal search engines mentioned earlier.

How democratic was it really? Let’s put it this way. If a sixth-grade dropout working for McDonald’s and the Scientific American both posted stories about Einstein’s Theory of Relativity within the same timeframe, a person searching for an article on the subject would be as likely to get one as the other.

Which was probably not such a good thing.

On the other hand, that version of the web also cut biased, blustery press barons down to size. For the first time in recorded history, a small journal or individual reporter’s take on events had as much access to the public as CBS News and the New York Times. For all its money and power, the media elite – at that particular moment in that very young medium – could not trample the (forgive the expression) “people’s” media. And that was, by and large, a very good thing.

The “people” it turned out, could manipulate black type on gray backgrounds and write article titles as well as the moguls. And glorious, libertarian anarchy reigned. For a moment.

End of story. We all know what happened next . Web technology quickly grew to the point where anyone with deep pockets (and techno-savvy employees) could buy their way to the top. So they did.

Which brings us back to AdWords, once the small-businessperson’s, small-budget entrée into the world of paid web advertising. In one sense, it still is that … you can still take $25 or $50 in monthly “mad” money and bet on keywords at ten or 20 ten cents apiece. In most cases, Google will happily accommodate your low-buck campaign and intermittently post your ads on some low-traffic site at 3 a.m. in whatever time zone most of your customers don’t live in.

(Note: Or, as is becoming more common, they may reject your ad if they decide the landing page – let’s say your site’s home page – doesn’t meet their rather obscure definition of “quality.”)

But here’s the killer, pay-per-click is a huge market, $40-plus billion is massive amount of money. Big money. Big money from big businesses.

Big businesses like AT&T, which spent roughly $90 million on AdWords in 2010, or Amazon (approximately $50 million) or J.C. Penney – a top ten Google search advertiser which bought more than $2.4 million worth of AdWords in June (2010) alone.

Hhhmmm, J.C. Penney … wasn’t that the company that scammed and spammed its way to the top of Google’s organic returns by buying thousands of bogus, irrelevant, bad-neighborhood links?

True, Penney was penalized after a competitor ratted them out to the New York Times and the Times managed to smuggle two reporters into Matt Cutts bunker for a face-to-face confrontation.

More to the point, the penalties were only applied after the holiday shopping season. During the four frenzied shopping months that mattered, Penney’s black-hat campaign reigned triumphant in organic returns while less well-funded (and more honest) competitors languished in purgatory.

Now some might say that Penney’s ability to navigate serenely through Matt Cutts and company’s supposedly impenetrable anti-search-engine-spam minefield and Penney’s annual contribution to AdWords’ bottomline were not entirely coincidental. Yes, some might say that. We, of course, could not possibly comment.

Except to say this. If AdWords no longer works for you, it’s probably because Adwords, like the web itself 15 or so years ago, has gone corporate. Which leads to click fraud. The weight of the big business gold dumped on what was once a more or less level playing field has tilted it so drastically that small operators are, in many cases, simply sliding off the edge.

For example, Googling the word “moccasins” recently produced nine AdWords ads in the right hand column. One, exactly one, was an e-vendor specializing in moccasins. Among the other eight we found Nordstrom’s (ranked number one), Brooks Brothers, Fossil and cable TV retail giant QVC.

Why Brooks Brothers, Kmart or QVC would bid premium amounts for the word “moccasins” is a perplexing question, but the fact is they did. A second fact is that a small-business site outbiding them could easily incur substantial losses if the conversion ratio of the hits wasn’t unusually high.

The problem, and it has absolutely nothing to do with Google, is the immutable law of supply and demand. The big boys have discovered that AdWords works and are demanding an ever increasing share of the supply. A demand they – AT&T, anyone? — are backing with some of the fattest bankrolls on earth.

Is there a way to fight that kind of power?

Of course there is. Remember the “old” internet’s level-playing field we cited earlier? As we said, technology and money eventually gave giant multinationals control of the news business. Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, ABC News, ESPN, etc. get zillions of hits more than most of their independent, shallow-pocket competitors.

Even so, their control is far from total. Tens of thousands of alternative news, information and sports sites still exist. Some of them – Wikileaks, the Drudge Report, the Huffington Post — have almost as high a profile and hit count as CNN.com and its ilk.

Likewise, small-business websites are alive, well and increasing in number every day because their owners have discovered the secret of beating the big boys despite the tilted playing field: Play the game smarter than they do.

Subject your site to intensive, intelligent search-engine optimization based on excellent content and an active, relevant linking profile by getting links from relevant sites, through link exchange as necessary. Consider branding your site through Facebook and Twitter, generate some buzz on blog sites and, if you can afford to throw $ down the drain, consider a small, tightly targeted AdWords campaign - but do so very slowly and carefully.

Watch your website’s analytics and watch the average user session time coming from the AdWords campaign. If the average user session time is less than 30 seconds, pull the plug and join millions of small businesses who have also been taken advantage of Google AdWords and focus your link building efforts on more traditional approaches such as relevant link exchange (which by the way has a very low cost and long term good results).

Remember our “moccasins” example? A truly smart, creative e-moccasin seller wouldn’t just groan that he couldn’t afford to outbid Nordstrom’s and Brooks Brothers and do nothing. The smart operator would poke around looking for angles, workarounds, hidden opportunities.

And he would have found one. He would eventually, just as we did, Google the word “moccasin.” Which, the day we tried it, returned exactly one AdWord ad (QVC.com) on page one.

OK, ok, ok … like all shoes, moccasins are sold in pairs. Most people searching for them – like 95 percent – are going to use the plural. Fine. But Joe and Jane’s Moc Shop can reach the other five percent for next-to-nothing per hit. If they’ve got brains, they’ll go for it.

We began this outrageously long blog with a quiz: Google AdWords are: a.) Page Rank Killers b.) Botnet Heaven c.) Ruled By Economic Forces d.) Profit Centers e.) All Of The Above.

Let’s end it by adding an additional option: f.) Whatever you make of them …

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The anti-trust statue denounces violations of its provisions as crimes and subjects violators to heavy criminal penalties.
– Lawrence Vold*, as quoted in Google Scholar

Does the United States government really believe that Google has committed “violations” of the anti-trust statutes and should be subjected to “heavy criminal penalties?”

Based on recent revelations that the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission have engaged in a three-year-long brawl over who should have the honors of prosecuting Big G, the answer would seem to be a resounding “yes!” If either agency thought the case was anything less than airtight they’d be running away from it rather than fighting to lead the charge to the courtroom.

With the Senate Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee having scheduled a September 21 hearing on “The Power of Google: Serving Consumers or Threatening Competition?” the DOJ and FTC have apparently reached a compromise. The deal calls for the DOJ’s antitrust division to investigate Google’s recent and planned acquisitions for possible competition-stomping violations and the FTC to probe Googliath’s increasing stranglehold on the search market.

While we would, frankly, love to devote a hundred posts and ten or 20 thousand words to all the juicy details of the political and legal infighting between the Sultan of Search and its enemies, we can’t. It would be fun, but it would also be miles off topic.

The LinksManager blog is supposed to be about linking – one-way linking, two-way linking, link exchanging, reciprocal linking – and internet, search engine and end user developments that in some way or another impact how and why we link.

Which means that our main interest must lie with the FTC’s scrutiny of Google’s search engine environment.

But before we go there, some brief comments on a few events indicating that at least some of these anti-trust issues are already having a major effect on the way Google does business.

First and foremost, there’s the Nortel patent auction. We’ll skip the details. Suffice it to say that whoever owns those patents will – after a suitable number of years and hundreds of millions in legal fees – own the licensing rights to the Android operating system.

Since Google owns Android, it is quite clear why they should want to retain the licensing rights. It is equally clear why Apple, Microsoft and RIM (Blackberry) would want the rights. New Android phone activations are outrunning combined iPhone, Windows Mobile and Blackberry activations by more than three to one and that ratio is likely to eventually spread to the tablet market.

If every manufacturer of Android devices had to pay a licensing fee to Apple and/or Microsoft or RIM it could – and almost surely would – become the biggest, baddest patent cash cow since … well, yes, since Windows.

So why did Google and its bidding partner Intel drop out of the Nortel patent bidding auction and let a consortium of companies led by Apple and Microsoft (and including RIM) buy them for a paltry $5.5 billion bucks? OK, $5.5 billion isn’t exactly paltry in the real world. But Google? Intel? They don’t live in the real world any more than the Pentagon does. (Neither does Microsoft or Apple, for that matter.)

The real reason, we suspect, Apple and Microsoft got those patents was because Microsoft’s antitrust problems are, after nine years, finally behind it (at least for the moment) and Apple, as far as the outside world knows, doesn’t have any. Though why the trust-busters aren’t jumping all over the iPod/iTunes/iStore iMonopoly is one of those inside the Washington beltway mysteries.

(NEWSBREAK: This just in, rumors are flying that the occupants of certain cubicles lining the corridors of the Justice Department are examining Apple’s core role in the Nortel patent war for signs of rot or worms.)

Intel, given the nature of the CPU market, is a perpetual antitrust target and Google … well, Google. Put it this way, would Eric Schmidt really want to go before Congress to explain away apparent monopolies in advertiser-supported internet search and advertiser-supported mobile device operating systems? (Google does not charge per-activation fees to license Android to phone makers, it is ad supported.) Would you?

And would you also like to be forced to deny, under oath, allegations that your search results are deliberately skewed to benefit advertisers or other significant others? Probably not. And probably Erich Schmidt wouldn’t like it either. But he’s almost certainly going to have to do it because ….

Welcome aboard. You don’t have to worry about passports and security scans, because this is only a virtual flight to Brussels, where the European Union on August 2 filed nine formal anti-trust charges against Google.

Though the exact nature of each count was not available as of this writing, one of them very likely concerns an allegation that Google tweaked its Italian search results to penalize – and in some cases delist – newspapers whose publishers opted out of having their contents appear in Google News Italia.

Perhaps mindful of the energizing effect an adverse ruling in Italy might have on U.S. regulatory junkies, Google settled a local Italian Competition Authority case based on these charges in January. Without admitting any wrongdoing, Google agreed to heighten corporate oversight of how newspapers were ranked and, more significantly, provide access to contracts governing its revenue-sharing arrangements with major AdSense partners.

As we said in our last blog, “Google currently receives right around 65 percent of the total number of search-engine queries generated by U.S. web users and is expected to break the 70 percent barrier by the middle of next year … (and) a 70 percent market share has been a historic red flag in the halls of the Justice Department’s Anti-Trust Division. ”

We also pointed out the seeming absurdity of trying to prosecute a company for achieving a so-called monopoly in “a bazaar in which every visitor is free to pick out any product he wants and use it for free”

But if the government can actually prove that Google manipulates its natural search returns to steer people to its own or its major advertisers’ sites and products, you can toss the “absurdity defense” out the window. A search engine with one or two or five or even 30 percent of all search queries doing a bit – or even a whole lot — of finagling is not going to set off any regulatory flares.

To be perfectly cynical – and absolutely correct – about it, those cases wouldn’t have nearly enough headline potential to interest any careerist Washington bureaucrat. (Unless, of course, the search engine in question happened to be Bing … .)

But Google? A company right at that 70 percent “monopoly” threshold? Against a target that big and visible, all kinds of charges could and would be filed.

Time for a reality check. At this moment, no federal charges of wrongdoing of any kind have been levied against Google. Official fact-finding investigations and media witch hunts have been launched. A congressional hearing has been scheduled.

Even if these processes eventually result in charges being filed – which is by no means certain – it will prove nothing. Charges are not convictions.

At the end of the day (or, more likely in this case, decade), the facts may very well prove that the only thing Google is “guilty” of is living up to its corporate philosophy of “making money without doing evil.”

Having said all that, let’s play “what if.” What if Google were convicted of operating an illegal monopoly of some kind?  How could the potential penalties affect small-business website operators?

OK, most of the remedies the government might seek would have nothing to do with any of us who aren’t Google shareholders or major advertisers. Huge fines, divestiture of such acquisitions as PostRank, AdMeld and SageTV, cease and desist orders involving “reward our friends, punish our enemies” search returns aren’t going to be felt by the small e-business community.

The only foreseeable penalty that could really filter down to our level is the most drastic one, an order that Google somehow cause the search-engine playing field to be leveled.

Would Larry Page, Serge Brin et al spend their – and their shareholders’ – last dollar fighting that one through every court three times? Maybe they would. And not just because of the lost billions in profits, either. We’re talking about some very proud individuals who are justifiably gratified by what they’ve built. Nobody uses Google search with a gun pointed at their head, after all, they make a conscious, informed decision to use it.

Let’s suppose, however, that was the ruling and the penalty stuck. Let’s further suppose that some method could be devised to enforce it – perhaps by prohibiting Google from adding new search bells, whistles, and services for a certain number of years to give its competitors time to catch up.

What would a world in which, for sake of argument, four search engines which each had roughly 25 percent of the daily queries do to us?

How about “drive us crazy” as an answer to that question? Let’s face it. Rightly or wrongly, for better or worse, 97 percent of us attempt to optimize our sites for Google while letting the other search engines’ chips fall where they may.

If we’re very good or very lucky (which is more important), we get a decent ranking on Google and a pretty similar ranking on the other engines which, because of Google’s dominance, are scared to death to use ranking algorithms more than a little red nasal hair’s different from Google’s.

In a new world order with no one engine dominant, however, each company would almost certainly use widely different algos in an attempt to differentiate its returns from the competitions’ and increase its market share.

We would, in essence, be forced to try and optimize our sites for two or three or four engines with substantially divergent views on the value of keywords vs. descriptions, on-page text vs. metatags, earned reciprocal links vs. random backlinks, etc. etc.

An impossible task? Probably. We might even wind up having to launch multiple sites with the same products but different content, structure, keywords and tags. Lots of fun, right?

Not! No fun at all. And not likely. It would be a pretty drastic step. But not impossible. After all, Microsoft’s alleged antitrust violations resulted in its serving nine years of pseudo-probation under the supervision of a federal district court. Nine years in which Linux grew like a weed, Apple (as a computer maker with a proprietary non-Windows operating system) came back from near death, and iTunes relegated Windows Media Player to the also-ran dustbin alongside the likes of RealPlayer, MJB, etc.

So court-ordered search-engine parity could someday – one day — happen.

If it does, one thing is certain. On that someday, that one day, reciprocal linking will be even more important for building traffic than it is now or has ever been before.

* Are Threefold Damages Under the Anti-Trust Act Penal or Compensatory, 28 Ky. L.J. 147

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Yes, yes, yes! You, or if not you, many, many webmasters a lot like you have been been tossing their baseball caps in the air and hoisting their six packs high at the news that Uncle Sam is casting its laser-like anti-trust eyes at Google.

For while it’s true that the U.S. government in all its might and majesty ain’t exactly David, it’s equally true that gizillions (or at least a great number) of people whose sites have been dissed by Googlebot would like to see Gogaliath cut down to size regardless of who’s doing the cutting.

Whoa there! Before joining the celebration, let’s examine some of the charges the government may (or, of course, may not) decide to file against the Sultans of Search and consider some of the penalties that might be levied if Google is convicted.

In Part Two of this blog, we’ll speculate about how penalties might affect our own web businesses. Will we prosper once we are freed from the shackles that bind us to Google? Or will the “devil we know” turn out to have been far easier to deal with than any new demons that may be unleashed by the courts.”

For now, in Part One, we’ll take a look at the most far reaching and intriguing indictment the government might levy against Google, that it a.) monopolizes the web search “industry” and b.) that said monopoly is anti-competitive and thus illegal.

The background is this. Google currently receives right around 65 percent of the total number of search-engine queries generated by U.S. web users and is expected to break the 70 percent barrier by the middle of next year or, according to some observers, the end of this year.

Talk about good news and bad news. The good news for Google is obvious, more searches equals more revenue. Both the number of Adword hits and the number of viewer impressions of Google’s display, multimedia, behaviorally targeted search advertising, etc. will go up. Increased Adword hits means more bucks for Google even at existing bid rates. Increased viewership of all the other ads will enable Google to raise their advertising rates without increasing the advertisers’ cost per thousand viewers (CPM) … an important factor in pacifying media buyers.

Now the bad news. A 70 percent market share has been a historic red flag in the halls of the Justice Department’s Anti-Trust Division. At that point a company, particularly an ultra-high-visibility company like Google, becomes a target for publicity hungry federal prosecutors to demonize and “take down” as a “monopoly.”

Though nothing involving lawyers is ever a sure thing. Two aspects of the government’s indicting Google for “monopolizing” the search market are certain; the case is sure to entertain law geeks and result in the re-writing of numerous legal textbooks.

Because there are issues. Issues without precedent. Issues like “can a bazaar in which every visitor is free to pick out any product he wants and use it for free” actually be considered a “market” in the legal meaning of the term.

Even more basic, for that matter, is the issue of whether a search query can be considered a product. If people in an office ask Supervisor A seven times as many questions as they ask Supervisor B, is Supervisor A guilty of operating a criminal monopoly?

Here’s another way to look at it. Say Google “gives away” the answers to 70 percent of the questions asked on the web. Simple math tells us its competitors, in aggregate, are only “giving away” 30 percent of the answers. IF a court determines that search queries DO constitute a market, Google would have a 70 percent marketshare and could possibly be successfully prosecuted. Right?

Not necessarily. Stripped of Latin flourishes and other mumbo-jumbo, the standard legal definition of “marketshare” is “the percentage of all products in a category that that company sells.”

But Google doesn’t sell search queries. They’re free. Not only that, Google’s major competitors don’t sell search queries either. They also give them away free and in the case of at least two of those competitors, they’ve been giving them away free since before Google even existed. So Google clearly didn’t get its alleged monopoly in search by using the time-honored method of predatory pricing.

The only way Google could hammer Bing, Yahoo and Ask six feet into the ground via predatory pricing would be to pay you to make search queries. And that generous they’re not.

There is, of course, the issue raised in the infamous Netscape v. Microsoft case. You know, the antitrust suit that was so delightfully enlivened by the revelation that Bill Gates indulged in Nuremburg-type pep rallies in which the troops were lashed into chanting “kill Netscape, kill Netscape.”

Perhaps somewhere up there in that great Google cloud gloriously covering us all with an infinite amount of data, much of it consisting of “Get Rich While You Sleep” schemes, “male enhancement pill” scams, and rabid political attack dog saliva, there is an email in which Serge Brin does say “Kill, Yahoo.”

Wouldn’t that alone make the Google monopoly illegal? Not if sanity prevails.

Bill Gates bellowing “kill, Netscape” meant absolutely nothing legally. What mattered was that Microsoft tried – and rather successfully at that – to carry out the chairman’s order to kill Netscape by using its near-monopoly in PC operating systems to force people to use Internet Explorer or else. Or else, in this case, going through a lot of hassle to “opt out” of IE and install a third-party browser that might or might not (not, if Microsoft could possibly arrange it) be fully compatible with the latest Windows release.

Google doesn’t do that. In the first place Google – the recently hatched Chrome OS notwithstanding — doesn’t make computer operating systems. Google doesn’t even bribe second- and third-tier software vendors to alter your system configuration in Google’s favor as part of their install process.

Yahoo and Ask, on the other hand, are notorious for “strategic relationships” with software companies that embed search toolbars in people’s browsers and change users’ home pages to Yahoo.com or Ask.com.

Alrighty, then. Does all this mean that Google won’t be convicted of having a monopoly on web search and is, therefore, in the clear?

Yes to the first part of the question. If sanity prevails, Google will not be convicted of monopolizing search. To convict Google of monopolizing search would be like convicting a presidential candidate of monopolizing an election because 70 percent of the voters freely and without coercion chose to vote for him. Still, it is always wise to remember that sanity is frequently a no-show at the court house, so anything could happen.

Regarding the second part of the question, definitely not. Google is not, absolutely not, in the clear. Like Microsoft, General Motors, RCA, the Bell System, the Edison Movie Trust, the East India Trading Company and thousands of other rich, powerful corporations throughout history, Google is quite obviously hell bent on attaining world domination. Exactly what world it wants to dominate and what form that domination would take is not as yet clear, but its lust for control is.
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More specifically, the government is investigating Google and such cash cow subsidiaries as Doubleclick for abusing the trust of its end users and using the tons of semi-personal data it harvests from every search to engage in numerous illegal, anti-competitive practices involving real dollars, hundreds of millions of them.

In Part 2, we’ll take a look at some of the charges Google could conceivably be convicted of, the penalties it might face and the ways in which those penalties might make marketing your site infinitely more difficult in the future than it is now.

Oh, almost forgot. (That’s a lie, we never forget the important parts.) We’ll also explain how a successful government anti-trust action against Google just might make reciprocal linking for traffic building more important than ever.

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Editor’s Summary: Panda is bad, maybe crippling news for link and content fakers, farmers, spammers and their customers. For you, the good guys wearing the white, virtual hats, it’s both very good news and a rare, powerful opportunity to improve your rankings by increasing the value of your site and its links.

Make no mistake about it: Panda is Google’s way of reminding would-be corrupters and despoilers of the Word Wide Web search industry, an industry that Google “owns” (or at least thinks it does), that payback is a bitch, that the time for payback is now, and that the payback penalties may be severe.

Nicknamed “Farmer,” apparently because of its “death to link and content farms” orientation, Panda is Google’s first coordinated global attempt in years, or maybe forever, to tilt the playing field in favor of those who play by the rules and against those who don’t.  Early results indicate it is working pretty well with somewhere around 12 percent of sites relying on black-hat search-engine-optimization techniques down-rated by as much as 50 percent, according to Google and substantiated by surveys conducted on hundreds of thousands of sites by authoritative sources such as CNET.

Prior to Panda, which is now running as Google’s primary search algorithm worldwide, Google’s efforts to enforce its policies against such dubious practices as link buying, selling, automated link drops, irrelevant reciprocal spam, etc,. largely consisted of warning webmasters about the evils of illicitly trying to beat the system and punishing offenders on an individual basis.

Unlike earlier Google anti-search-engine-spam protocols, however, Panda seems to recognize that the great majority of “black-hat” linking and content scams are not instigated by lone, small-time operators.  They are, rather, products of a number of large, well-financed link and content bucket shops (to steal a term from the world of illegal penny stock promotions) – many of them operating numerous websites selling slight variations of the same scam.

In other words, Panda “knows” that the search-manipulation business is a form of “organized” crime and it fights it by punishing the top layer of criminals by severely down-rating the multitude of sites they use to reach out and ensnare suckers.

Unfortunately for the “suckers,” Google’s X-million-buck investment in technology to ferret out the operators behind the search-engine spam business has also made it infinitely easier for Googlebot to identify, red flag, and penalize sites that bought into those scams.

To tell it like it is: If you’ve been getting away with buying links from a quick-buck, automated link broker, Panda — probably sooner than later – is likely to flush your ranking down the tube along with the rankings of all the other “fish” on that broker’s sucker list.  And the same fate awaits you if you rely on warmed-over pseudo articles from an article farm to try and skate around Google’s emphasis on quality content as a ranking factor.

Now the good news for good guys part.

As might be expected in an official statement, Matt Cutts, Google VP and anti-search-engine spam czar, has been suitably and corporately restrained in his descriptions of Panda, though he has admitted that close to 15 percent of all Google’s site return positions have changed since its release.

“This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites,” Cutts said. “Sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful.  At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites.”

Though Google, as always, doesn’t release specific details about any of the “more than 200 factors” that go into its ranking and return decisions, it is clear, according to a consensus of expert Google stalkers, that Panda considers link quality and acquisition method major elements in rendering its life and death decisions.

Now, as ever before, the vast majority of websites, probably 95 percent-plus of small business e-commerce sites, can ONLY get a reasonable number of quality links from authority sites via relevant link exchange.

Fortunately, Google recognizes this.  It understands the underlying logic that you, as the proprietor of a top-ranked, high-authority site, will only bestow links on other far-above-average, ultra-high-quality sites. And having bestowed that link, would you NOT want a link back?  Of course you would, you’d probably insist on it since the link would provide a quality value-add to your customers and might aid your site’s ranking.

Google, as we said, understands this.  It wrote Panda to demand quality inbound links, NOT, necessarily, unreciprocated quality inbound links. (Note: That said, you can use LinksManager to generate one-way backlinks as well as exchanges. Check out this article in the Linking School to find out how.)

The second part of the Panda/linking equation – the part about linking to social media sites and pages – is more interesting for two reasons. 1. It is a relatively recent addition to the laundry list of items Google expects high-quality sites to have “in stock,” and 2. Panda is poised to begin (if it hasn’t already) inserting social media site pages into Google’s normal organic search returns. But not to worry, LinksManager, as always when it comes to productive, ethical, Google-compliant linking, already has you covered, making it as easy and time-efficient to establish and manage links from Facebook, etc. as it to handle them from any other site.

There’s a lot more we could say about Panda and the plans Google reportedly has for it, but for right now the most important point to remember is that LinksManager is as “Panda” friendly as it was “Caffeine” friendly, “Brandy” friendly and every other Google-update-in-history friendly.

We don’t normally brag on it, but we do track the rankings of LinksManager subscribers and for more than a decade, 97 percent have continued to rank well after each successive Google update – including the February 24th U.S. release of Panda.

There are a number of reasons for this, such as the near-impossibility of using LinksManager in violation of Google’s guidelines, but the main one is the simple fact that our member sites consistently add relevant links organically (organically means slowly/naturally) over a sustained period of time.

Graphed, a LinksManager-powered linking program shows a geometrically natural upward progression in link quantity that search agents like Googlebot expect from a quality site built with integrity.  A graph of a black-hat site or even a gray-area site populated with automatically harvested links shows just the opposite, a series of spikes and crashes instantly recognizable as synthetic.

Bottomline is this: Nine or ten weeks into the Panda-era, LinksManager’s ethical, editor-based system is working to build traffic and improve search-engine rankings as well as ever.  Meanwhile, sites that link for volume instead of relevancy and opt for pay-for-play links instead of earned links are getting flushed in record numbers.

Frankly, we’d be lying if we didn’t admit to being more than a little satisfied that after all these years – 13 for us, just as it has been for Google – we’re still on top of the curve and delivering the very best, most totally penalty-proof, editor based link management system ever devised and patented.

Meanwhile, here’s a “programming note.” For some thoughts on “How to make Panda work for you,” check out the Linking School on or about May 10.

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By now we’re all aware of the holiday-season return-position win J.C. Penney scored with its phony backlink scam. (If you’re one of the two or three people who aren’t aware of it, please read the last post or Google “Penney link scam” or something similar.) And we’re also aware, or should be, that if the New York Times hadn’t blown the whistle on Penney’s they might still be top-ranked for search terms that should have landed them 50 or more return pages back.

That, as the saying goes is ancient (or least 90 days old) history. But, to use another really awful cliche, the Penney’s scandal revealed “the dark underbelly” of using backlinks as a primary factor in determining page rank. Which is a current and ongoing issue that the whole web community should be debating, as in …

Resolved: Backlinks Are Better Than Reciprocal Links For SEO Purposes.

Since virtually the whole damn world, including and especially the crooks who peddle tons of irrelevant, bogus backlinks to innocent internet virgins (yeah, right) like J.C. Penney, has already come down on the positive side of that debate, we’ll take the negative. As in NO!

Truth is, backlinks are morally, ethically and, most of all, logically inferior to reciprocal – i.e. exchanged links — for ranking purposes for one big, wrenching, gut-level, overall reason: Things done in secret always have more potential to be used with evil intent than things done in the clear light of day.

The best recipe for growing mushrooms is to plant them in a pile of manure hidden from the light. Guess what? That’s a how a lot of backlinks are planted, thousands and thousands of them in the Penney’s case.

The point is simply this, except in obvious cases such as a resort back linking to a weather site or a retailer back linking to a map site, the rationale for most backlinks is cloaked in secrecy. Neither you nor the search bots can ferret out exactly why the link was established.

Was the link awarded for a good, meritorious reason? Or was it intended to be a bit of search-engine spam? Could the backlinks pointing to a particular site have been manipulated by someone trying to phony up a bogus page rank for their own site. Or, maybe – and this has happened – all those porno and hate page links to a particular site were planted by some low-life seeking to destroy a competitor’s business.

A search bot may suspect – as apparently some did in the Penney’s case – that a given backlink or a given hundreds of back links – are spam, but they are programmed (for the moment) to give the linked-to site the benefit of the doubt because, after all, neither J.C. Penney nor anyone else has – as the excuse always goes – “any control over who links to our site.”

Which is the crux of why using backlinks as a major ranking factor is a figuratively criminal way of assigning return position. The opaque nature of the process makes it hard for mathematical algorithms to assess and apply penalties for bad backlinks. It also allows officials of cheatin’ sites like Penney’s to laugh their heads off at the rest of us by righteously proclaiming (fingers tightly crossed behind their backs) that “J.C. Penney did not authorize, and we were not involved with or aware of, the posting of the links.”

Yes, it is a ridiculous claim, but how can anyone prove it wrong unless Penney’s SEO contractor decides to turn “state’s evidence” so to speak. And how likely is that?

Now consider a decent, hard-working reciprocal link. Reciprocal links and exchanged links are totally transparent. The search bots (and human “bots” too) instantly see both ends of each link and understand why it was established, which means that each and every link can be evaluated on its own merits.

That’s really important, so we’re going to put it in boldface and repeat it: The search bots (and human “bots”, too) instantly see both ends of each link and understand why it was established, which means that each and every link can be evaluated on its own merits.

If the link is relevant, if it contains information benefiting end users, if it’s from a white-hat host and lives in a good neighborhood, it should add to page rank and return position.

If it’s a borderline, negligible link, it shouldn’t affect ranking one way or the other.

But if it’s a black-hat link, a bad link, a spam link … the bot can and should subtract ranking points or apply penalties without any ifs, ands or buts because the webmaster hosting that spam link can absolutely, positively NOT say he did “not authorize and … (was) not involved with or aware of the posting” of the link.

In summation, the idea that “you link to me and I WON’T link to you” makes more SEO sense than “you link to me and I WILL link to you” is retarded, offensive and just plain dumb. The only factor that should have any weight whatsoever is the QUALITY of the link itself.

All right than, the debate is closed and we’ve won.  (At least as far as we’re concerned.)

By the way, insiders report that the mainframes have been humming overtime at all the major search engines to crank up their ability to quickly identify and drastically punish paid link and other backlink spam. The NYT story on Penney’s gave the entire industry a big, bruised global black eye when it was picked up by every major news outlet in the world and nobody wants to see than kind of investigative report repeated.

Link scammers beware!

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Exactly how did the mighty J. C. Penney, number 133 on the Fortune 500, manage to fall from Google’s #1 return position for search terms like “living room furniture,” “dresses,” “Samsonite carry-on luggage,” and dozens of similar queries in less than four or five hours earlier this month?

Amazingly enough, Penney’s full-time, professional marketing “experts” may have been seduced by the same kind of black hat, buy-a-backlink scam that has thrashed thousands of websites of all sizes — from part-time mom-and-pop operations to large vendors like GourmetGiftBaskets.com, who’s story about losing $4 million while banned from the Google Index was related in a previous LinksManager blog.

And now a true giant, J.C.Penney, with almost 1200 retail stores, more than $17 billion in annual revenue and a huge web presence has fallen.

Why?

Because, according to a New York Times investigation, someone, possibly Penney’s SEO company of choice, an outfit called SearchDex, created thousands of irrelevant, unethical and inappropriate backlinks to numerous J.C. Penney pages.

“There are links to JCPenney.com’s dresses page on sites about diseases, cameras, cars, dogs, aluminum sheets, travel, snoring, diamond drills, bathroom tiles, hotel furniture, online games, commodities, fishing, Adobe Flash, glass shower doors, jokes and dentists — and the list goes on,” the Times reported.

“Some of these sites seem all but abandoned, except for the links,” the Times added. “The greeting at myflhomebuyer.com sounds like the saddest fortune cookie ever ‘Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn’t here.’ ”

For the record, SearchDex, which declined to talk with Times’ reporters, has responded to the charges by posting a note on their website.

In it, CEO Dave Chaplin states that “SearchDex has not participated in, nor endorsed the linking schemes mentioned in the New York Times article. Our company is built on the highest ethical standards and at no point have we incorporated the use of improper linking schemes or other gaming techniques into programs for our clients. SEO tactics employed by SearchDex for all of our clients, past and present, have been compliant with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.”

But have they? 

Far be it for us, a purveyor of absolutely 100 percent, no strings, ands, ifs, or buts attached search-engine-compliant linking solutions to pretend to know more than the New York Times.  But when it comes to linking, we just do.  And that’s a fact.

We also, perhaps, crawled a bit further into SearchDex.com than the Times reporters did.

Virtually every page on the website is heavily imbued with the message that SearchDex engages only in ethical SEO practices, but there is little mention of linking.  (Note: The fact that searchdex.com, as of 2/24/2012, is nowhere to be seen on the first five pages of Google returns for “ethical search engine optimization provider” is not, perhaps, a great achievement for an SEO firm.)

If you persist and drill down three or four levels, however, you will find a page named “SearchDex Response to Google Guidelines.”

As of February 24, here’s what that page had to say about linking: (Google Guideline in normal text, SearchDex comment in italics.)

– Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
SearchDex does not support link scheme architectures.

– Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
Sites which employ these techniques are not eligible for the SearchDex license. Indexed pages do not contain hidden text or hidden links.

Here’s what the “SearchDex Response to Google Guidelines” does not say. It does not say that the Technical and Quality Guidelines it cites are a mere subset of the requirements for full compliance with Google standards.

There is, for example, also this, which is located at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356:
“Some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites.”

“This is in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results. Examples of link schemes can include:

• Links intended to manipulate PageRank
• Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
• Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (”Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)
• Buying or selling links that pass PageRank”

Flashing back to the “SearchDex Response to Google Guidelines” page do we see anything saying they do not hook up with “partner pages exclusively for the purpose of cross linking.” or pay strenuous attention to the quality of the links they gather?  Does their “response” to Google guidelines rule out the “buying or selling of links that pass PageRank?”  Why no, it doesn’t.

Which isn’t to say that SearchDex does any of those so-called “black hat” things. Or that it does now, or ever has, done anything unethical, immoral, fattening or even slightly beyond the pale in its entire existence. Our point – and probably the New York Times’ as well – is that things happened that got J.C.Penney heavily penalized and that those things – whether the result of human or computer error or deliberate intent – could very possibly have happened at the third-party SEO provider’s end.

As with most stories, there is a moral and some good guys involved in this one:

First the moral, as stated by Google itself, “deciding to hire an SEO is a big decision that can potentially improve your site and save time, but you can also risk damage to your site and reputation. Make sure to research the potential advantages as well as the damage that an irresponsible SEO can do to your site.”

While that moral applies to every site, from yours to Penney’s, the reality is that Penney, and every other Fortune 500 corporation, is going to neither live nor die by search engine returns.  Their bottomline will be affected to one degree or another by number one rankings or delistings, but the companies will putt along relatively unaffected.

Can you say the same about your online business?  Would it remain profitable if two hours from now its return position dropped 80 or 100 places?

Look, we would like you to use LinksManager.  We do not and never have made any bones about that.  It will save you time, increase your link productivity and keep you in full, absolute compliance with Google and the other engine’s requirements whether stated in their official “guidelines” or somewhere else.

But even without LinksManager, you’ve got a much better chance of staying on Google’s good side by handling your SEO efforts yourself rather than risking having an outsider inflict the “damage to your site and reputation” that Google notes.

Now for the heroes, the thousands of local web operators like Arearugs.com and Edressme, both of which displaced J.C. Penney as #1 in their major categories, who did things right and moved up in the rankings after the rogue Goliath’s deep and sudden fall from Google grace.

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When was the last time you sat down and took a peek at cyberspace from Google’s end of the telescope?

The last time you considered Google’s mission and the challenges it has to surmount and problems it has to solve to successfully perform that mission?

Challenges? Problems? Google? Didn’t Googliath post record earnings of $2.54 billion in its most recent fiscal quarter? Up a whopping 25% from its net income for the same quarter last year?

Challenges? Problems? We’d all like to be as monumentally challenged and beset by woes as Google, right?

Yer dern totin’ we would.

But the problems and challenges we’re talking about aren’t about money. (It may be hard for many of you to believe it after the last couple of years, but there are actually a few problems that don’t involve red ink and overdraft notices.)

Take Google’s mission. Like any other for-profit enterprise, Google’s “corporate” mission is to make money. Something it seems to be doing quite well without any challenges or problems getting in the way. Its “functional” mission, the goal its products are intended to attain, is something else altogether. That mission is to provide end-users — every person on the planet who visits a Google site — a better web experience. Since the greatest chunk of the Google iceberg involves search returns, that mission involves providing end-users the best, most relevant, answers to their queries.

It is, beyond question or argument, a mission impossible. If you Google “Ford parts,” for example, Google has no idea whether you’re searching for parts for a specific model or Ford parts generically. It doesn’t know whether you’re interested in new parts or used parts, vintage parts or late-model parts, parts actually made by Ford, aftermarket parts, or all parts for Ford vehicles regardless of manufacturer.

To put it simply, there is no way Google or any other search engine provider is going to bat a thousand at providing a link to exactly what an end-user is looking for in the number one return position. Truthfully, there’s no way search engines are going to bat 1000 — or even 500 — at giving users a “perfect” response within the first 10 returns.

Fortunately for the engines’ peace of mind and bottom line, end-users, by and large, understand the complexities of finding exact matches for their queries and don’t expect the search engines to bat 1000 or even 500.

But there is a vast difference between batting 150, 250 and 350. In today’s major league baseball environment a hitter with a 350% average and his agent will be salivating out of every orifice in their bodies at the thought of the contract extension they’re planning to negotiate. A batter at the 250% level, if he fields his position well and stays out of trouble with the law, will have no problem hanging on to a major league roster spot for 10 years or more. The 150% batter has only one option: a cup of coffee and a bus ride home.

Google’s challenge, which it has obviously been handling admirably, is figuring out what a search engine needs to do to bat 350 and to keep doing those things better than its competitors. Its problem, which it shares with all the other engines, is that many — if not most — web operators keep tossing the engines “curveballs” that make maintaining a 350% average exceedingly difficult.

Ironically, most such curveballs are intended to be puff balls, easy search-engine-optimization pitches for Googlebot to drive out of the park. Why than do so often “reach the plate” as curveballs which are as likely to de-SEO a site as to optimize it? The answer: Many webmasters do not clearly understand what Googlebot is tasked to do.

They know it’s supposed to return the most relevant, appropriate responses to queries. What they don’t know is that Googlebot operates under a very heavy Catch-22. Its creators want it to return relevant, appropriate responses from good sites ahead of relevant, appropriate responses from average, mediocre or poor sites. The Catch 22 is that they’ve never been able to write an algorithm that separates exceptional sites from OK sites and OK sites from lame sites.

The reason is content. Googlebot can actually tell quite a bit about content. It can tell whether the content is properly spelled, whether the punctuation and sentence structure is acceptably good, whether it is relevant to a website’s field of interest, whether it is old and stale or new and fresh, whether it is unique or whether it has been duplicated thousands of times across cyberspace.

What Googlebot can’t determine is whether or not the bloody content is any damn good. In all the raving and ranting about “authority sites” found on webmaster blogs, forums, panel discussions, etc., etc., etc., there’s one fact that’s almost never mentioned. Googlebot doesn’t have the slightest clue whether any of the content on those so-called authority sites is actually authoritative.

Consider one of those mega sites which purport to tell people how to do this, that and the other thing. The largest purveyor of these tidbits of wisdom typically pays its “expert authors” $7.50 or $15 per article. After successfully completing a few test assignments, contributors are allowed to pick and choose what they want to write about from categorized listings.

Whether or not they happen to be experts on a particular subject – or know anything at all about it – is irrelevant. Somebody with five DUIs and two vehicular homicides can snatch a quick $7.50 by scrawling a 500-word how-to on defensive driving. An 18-year-old community college freshman with no education in medicine or physical training can score $15 by telling you how to stretch your sciatic nerve.

Will following the instructions in one of these site’s articles on “cleaning and repairing chimneys” make it less likely that you will have a chimney fire and burn your house down this winter? Or will it make it more likely? Unless you’re an expert on the subject yourself, there’s no way for you to know. And there’s also no way for Googlebot to know.

Want to know if a given piece of content is correct or incorrect, information or disinformation, authoritative or ignorant, good content or bad content? Don’t ask Google. It can’t tell you.

To compensate for its inability to separate the real from the bogus, Googlebot, to a large extent, uses “popularity” as a synonym for “quality.” Since counting links is one way in which Google determines popularity, virtually all small business sites have always needed, and still need, a robust linking presence in order to rank well.

What’s a “robust” linking presence? The most common answer is “lots of relevant links to sites which live in good neighborhoods and have decent PageRanks.” That answer, though it’s true enough, isn’t complete. It doesn’t take into account two things about Google that many webmasters don’t clearly understand:

1: Googlebot analyzes pages, not websites. To understand this, spend some time reading Matt Cutts Blog. Eight times out of ten when he’s talking about rankings and returns he references pages, not sites. What Googlebot does is analyze a site’s pages – their internal content and external links – and aggregates its findings into an overall site rating.

2: Google is not running a “pure” popularity contest, it’s running a “peer” popularity contest. Which means it tends to give more positive weight to links from highly relevant “peer” pages than it does to links from generically relevant home or index pages.

Okay, that sounds simple enough. It’s not brain surgery. Any web operator smart enough to spell “cat” or subscribe to LinksManager should be able to figure out what highly relevant “peer” pages are and negotiate link exchanges that include them.

Right?  Not always.

Here’s a mythical example: Chain Link R Us makes all kinds of chain link fences and enclosures which it sells through a 100-page site –ChainLinkRus.com (CLRU) . From 12-foot-high barricades surrounding our virtual ball park, to short, completely enclosed dog runs, from prison exercise yards to hog panels to keep pigs from slipping and sliding in the muck that is their natural habitat, CLRU has it all.

One of CLRU’s link partners, PFFFPF.com (Puppy Farms Forever Forever Puppy Farms), sells dogs. A link between the dog sales site and the dog kennel sales site is obviously relevant, non-competitive, and potentially of interest to end users of both sites.

The flea in the ointment is CLRU’s home page. CLRU sells thousands of linear feet of chain link every year and only a small portion of it leaves the factory as a dog run. Dog runs are actually one of the smallest branches on CLRU’s product tree and, as such, they’re relegated to a simple NavBar submenu link on the company’s home page.

Despite this, nine out of ten times — probably even 99 out of a hundred times – the link between two sites like these will go from one home page to the other.

Looked at from Googlebot’s position in the batter’s box, that link doesn’t travel a straight line from clickthrough to the information the user wants, it follows a roundabout route. Which makes it, pure and simple, a curveball.

Not that Googlebot will miss the connection. One thing Googlebot does extremely well is drill through pages, so it will certainly find ChainLinkRus.com/dogruns.html and recognize that it makes ChainLinkRus.com at least minimally relevant to PFFPF.com.

The question is, how minimal is minimally. As a standalone link, ChainLinkRus.com/dogruns.html – with 100 percent of its content specifically about dog runs — wouldn’t be “minimally” relevant to PFFPF.com, it would be “highly” relevant. But Google isn’t allowed to consider it as a standalone link. It has to treat it as a meager 1% of a 100-page site. With very little, if any, content about the products on that page appearing on any of the other 99 pages, it’s easy to see why the home page-to-home page link has little relevancy.

One other thing about Googlebot, Google likes to pretend that it mimics humans in deciding what it likes and what it doesn’t. (Which it actually does in a surprising number of ways.) So let’s pretend we’re all humans for a minute.

We’ve just bought a Moscow Water Dog puppy from PFFPF.com and we’re looking for a dog run. We go to PFFPF.com’s “Resources” page and click on ChainLinkRus.com’s link. Instantaneously we’re whisked to ChainLinkRus’s home page, where we find banners and pictures of five or six chain link products, none of which happen to be a dog run.

At this point, we may or may not root around until we find the proper page.

But even if we do, a seed of doubt has been planted.  

The indirect link has told us that dog runs are not an important part of CLRU’s business. It has called into question CLRU’s expertise and authority on dog runs. It has reduced ChainLinkRus.com’s relevancy in our eyes just as it has in Googlebot’s.

If you were to sum all the above verbiage up into a rule, it would be this: The more precisely your links are focused, the more they will add to your site’s search engine appeal. Fortunately, LinksManager makes it as easy to create relevant-page-to-relevant-page direct links as it is to create curvy home-page-to-home-page ones. For some ideas on how to do it, check out our posts on oblique linking, linking policy and deep linking.

Remember, when it comes to playing ball with Google, a wicked curve is one pitch you really don’t want to throw.

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