Yesterday I witnessed a pretty phenomenal panel at SES called “Are Paid Links Evil?” With a title like that, you know there is going to be some heat right off the bat. I wasn’t going to post at all, but I think I’ll throw my few cents in. First of all everyone on the panel (except Andy Baio) did a phenomenal job. Matt did a great job of toeing the company line, and diverting any questions into the question he wishes the attendee would have asked. Michael Gray in my opinion did a great job of hitting Matt’s points out of the park. Thats not to say that Matt doesn’t have some legitimate points, but Michael was able to pretty well knock down the ones Matt brought up. Todd Malicoat reiterated several of Michael’s points and added a few valid points of his own. I wouldn’t say he added anything earth shattering, but to be fair Michael covered almost everything. Greg and Todd added the “Look, we do this” perspective and I always love hearing Greg talk because he doesn’t mince words. This crack team really took a lot of the FUD-power out of the search-engine’s argument. Andy did a good job of convincing everyone that he wasn’t qualified to even sit at the same table as Greg, Todd, Michael, and Matt much less speak to the question of legitimacy of paid links.

So a few points:

- Matt argued that people are trying to muddy the water and accusing Google of saying that “all paid links are bad”. Matt drew a distinction between paid links that pass PR and paid links that would be clicked by users. If anything, I think Matt is muddying the water in this case. Look we all know what we’re talking about here, the buying and selling of PR. To say that some paid links are ok if they don’t pass PR is creating confusion, not clearing it up. Lets tackle the actual issue, is it evil to sell PR?

- It is in fact nearly impossible to rank in a competitive space without buying links. Google created this monster. You can’t just put your site out there and “do good” and expect to rack up links. It simply won’t happen. Buying some juice is critical. Unless Google can put a stop to it COMPLETELY, its futile to talk about doing it on any level.

- At the beginning of the session they showed this amusing video. As you can see I just linked to the video. The site is about home rentals. How is that a relevant link? How does that improve the user experience? It doesn’t. And yet before getting called out on it, Matt encouraged this type of thing as “creative”. So its ok to make an off-topic link-baiting piece, but buying a link from an on-topic relevant site to connect 2 sites that are in the same space is not ok by G/Y/M? Thats just ridiculous.

- One more thing I’m going to add in edit: lets not forget that this buying/selling links hurts Google’s OWN link-selling business. Like I said before, we’re talking about PR-passing links..but the reality is that this DOES affect their own bottom line with AdWords.

I think those are the key things I’d like to throw into the ring. Certainly no one “won” the argument, although if you were on the fence hopefully it pushed you either way more definitively. I think Google is going to go on a major PR offensive to spread FUD about buying/selling links. I do think it’s good that the search engines aren’t just getting a pulpit to spread their FUD like I’ve heard has happened in the past.

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