Paid Advertising Putting Baby In A Corner?

Okay, so I’ve let a bit of time pass by on this, but mostly because I wanted to see what everyone else was saying before I opened my yap, and I wanted to see how long the buzz lasted (for the record, less than a week). Matt Cutts has asked the internet masses to now REPORT sites that use paid advertising.

I’m a huge fan of Matt’s but this is getting a little extreme even for my tastes. While I agree that paid links should be acknowledged to the site visitors (as can be seen in the “sponsors” link on my sidebar), and that transparency and disclosure in terms of paid reviews and affiliate links is the “high road”, I think asking the masses to report sites that have paid links on them is a bit too much like encouraging tattle-taling in kindergarteners.

In fact, please go read Matt’s post about hidden links, because this is something that I’m strongly against, and have had far too many clients come to me with these types of links in their sites – without even knowing they were there. (They were likely put there by a less-than-honorable designer/SEO prior to them coming to me.) Seriously, even if you think you know what I mean by “hidden links” – go read this one. This is a relatively “new” way of doing it.

However I’m not a fan of his other posts on the topic. For one thing, it’s been mentioned already that morning radio dj’s don’t say “this was a paid review” when they talk about their latest cellphone plan or their new favorite restaurant in your local metro area, but everyone knows that the reason he said it was to get some free upgrade or an extra bottle of wine with dinner. No one ever comes out and says that Coca-Cola is a paid sponsor for TV’s “American Idol”, however you can’t miss those gigantic red cups that the judges drink from during the show.

Of course, there’s a retort to that, because that’s television/radio and not print media. Newspapers have clear, defined ad sections. Magazines that publish full page ads that are designed to look like they’re part of the ‘zine but are solely for advertising will put “ADVERTISEMENT” somewhere along the binding or bottom of the page. (Yes, it’s usually in light grey lettering, but it’s there. Oh no! Isn’t that the same as “hidden text”? For shame!)

But which side of the line does the internet fall, and why is Google trying to tell us what we can and can’t have on our websites?

As has been quoted several times already, this is directly off Google’s site (Google’s Webmaster Guidelines):

• Make pages for users, not for search engines.
• Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”

• I don’t see how including paid advertising on a site can affect users negatively if it’s disclosed. I also don’t see how reporting sites that allow paid advertising TO A SEARCH ENGINE follows this guideline. I guess this one’s up for interpretation? Depends on what the Big G is trying to crank down on whether or not it matters what we do?
• Advertising for relevant companies related to your site’s niche can help your users by giving them another resource to find more information. Just because you get money for linking to a product doesn’t mean that you don’t believe in said product. In fact, I don’t allow links to anything unrelated or anything I don’t believe will help my site’s visitors. And yes, I would do it if search engines didn’t exist. I like money just like everyone else.

I think if Google wants to tackle a problem, they need to focus on the sites that trick people. Sites that use doorway pages, scripts, redirects, that sort of thing. There are SO many other, much more “heinous” tactics being used than paying for ads. (Here we go, back to TV/Radio/Magazines again… if no one advertised, the networks and publications would crumble.)

Can’t they just give us some commented code to use around the ad blocks that would signal the spiders as to what we’re doing, but not punish us for doing so? (Note: I can’t honestly say one way or the other whether I’d comply if they intended to use the commented code to punish me… that’s like telling a child to go “cut a switch” for a whippin’. But if there were a guarantee that using it would NOT punish my rankings, then I might.)

Note to Google: Not EVERYONE buys links for the purpose of getting the PR juice. Some people do think of it as another form of traditional advertising!!!! Why punish everyone for the sins of the bad seeds?