Recently the world of SEO has erupted at the news that Google is stamping down on any webmasters who sell text links. Many sites have seen a huge drop in Pagerank, and some have even noticed a drop in search rankings.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is very much an industry where you need to stay ahead of the field to be successful. What works today may not work in 6 months, and therefore you need to have vision and be able to adapt to changes.

Back in 2006 I made a prediction that this would happen. Yet the majority of experts in the industry thought I was crazy. They were all enjoying the benefits of text link advertising, and there was no way they were willing to accept that it wouldn’t be around for many more years.

I couldn’t understand why so many “experts” were being so naive and short sighted. Weren’t they the ones who are supposed to predict things like this in advance?

In early 07 Matt Cutts hinted towards the penalization of text link selling activities, and some people decided to call me the psychic SEO.

So I have been asked to give my thoughts on Text Link Advertising, Google, and the big no follow debate. I appreciate there is already a lot of noise regarding these issues, but since I am one of a handful of people to see this coming, it may be worth a read.

To predict the future we need to look to the past! We need to understand why certain things happen, and what that signifies for the future.

So let’s go back to the early days of Google the search engine:

Google originally wanted the most relevant sites to be top of their listings, then, people realised how to manipulate Google, and relevant was no longer enough.

So then they looked for outside factors like links and trust.

This worked for a long time, but then link buying became mainstream…. here is the thing, Google doesn’t want the companies with the most money at the top of the rankings, the search engines are supposed to be about mom and pop sites having a chance etc… but the selling of text links basically said that whoever spends the most wins.

This may be ideal for the PPC model, but it certainly is not what search engines are supposed to be about. If it was, we may as well get rid of organic rankings and only have the paid ones.

That is the key word “organic”…. you see, when you spend $1k a month on buying your way to the top of Google, that is not organic, it is forced and manipulated, it means that all the kids with their blogs etc will not be heard. It creates a divide where the rich get richer and the rest lose interest.

That is not what the net is all about. It never has been, and hopefully never will.

So it doesn’t surprise me at all that Google are doing this. What does surprise me is why I was one of only a handful of so called “experts” to predict this so early, out of the entire industry, and why people are a) getting upset about it b) are surprised

That said, if text link ads are used as they were originally intended (to drive traffic), then I see no issue with that. So I am all for the nofollow tags.

So what is the next likely step in this whole mess?

For me it will involve paid reviews

You can get a few links in a paid review, and nobody has targeted them yet. Also, paid review links are lifetime links.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to create a set of algos to detect sites that sell text links, but since Google most likely hire rocket scientists, it was even more likely that one day they would be able to flag sites that sell links.

So here is my next prediction for 08.

Paid reviews will become more popular (early 08), by late 08, Google will try and ban or filter links from within paid reviews (but it will be much harder to detect)

By 09 the search engines will be like a social voting site. based on voting and social algos like Stumbleupon etc…

From the Psychic SEO