Google vs Links sales: the worst is yet to come

Aaron Wall posts about a trend that’s opened up to a lot of webmasters over the New Year - falling Adsense revenues.

The chatter has been around for a while, and it seems the recent move to reduce the clickable space in Adsense could well be contributing - but the economic downturn hitting big corporate advertisers is almost certainly a complicating factor as well.

Here’s the problem - SEO offers the most cost-effective ROI on any other marketing method. That’s a fact. It also usually offers a more cost-effective method of monetising as website than Adsense alone.

So if publishers find revenues falling, link sales is going to be an obvious consideration for a number for increasing revenues - especially as affiliate revenue is likely to also be affected.

And if PPC spends are falling due to an economic downturn, then those same big PPC spenders will be looking more to SEO for cost-effective returns - which means link sales.

The danger is of both supply and demand coming together, because it will exacerbate an already tense situation with Google regarding link buying and selling.

I do a lot of work in the financial services sector, and I know most of the high street names already have SEO budgets, and are pushing more on off-page factors. The momentum of slow-moving but massive corporate dinosaurs is already moving this way.

Google has always been a links driven search engine - PageRank was revolutionary because it looked at link relationships between websites and their keyword relationships - as opposed to Alta Vista’s obsession with on-page factors.

Google won - but as the commercial web expanded, and commercial pressures with it, those link relationships can now be bought and sold and faked - for a price.

It’s always been Google’s Achilles Heel, and every time some moron pushes a big public link scheme, or else argues about how it is their right to sell links and Google should allow it, all they are doing is shouting out that Google has this Achilles Heel.

The longer this short-term bravado continues, the more likely this will accelerate Google into finding ways to diminish link relationships in a way useful to SEO’s.

Already they’ve crippled public access to PageRank values, and the introduction of Google Universal continues to muddy the waters on what is actually being achieved with link development.

And we can only expect things to get worse if I’m right about the market supply and market demand for links sees a boost through diminishing revenues for publishers, and diminishing returns for PPC advertisers.

In the meantime, I’m remaining focused on asset development than revenue generation - my hope is that when economic conditions start to move upwards again, it about 2 years time - then by being focused on long-term survival I may just end up with the best revenue strategy of all.

I can only hope my optimism is well-founded, because in the meantime, link developers may have to make an extra special effort to keep their heads down - because the threshold on Google’s radar is getting smaller and smaller.