As a customer you might just go through the remaining results, that catches your attention or try on with a new search phrase for a better set of results.

As a more technology savvy user, you might laugh at Google’s search algorithm and wonder what the “Pocket PC Services” has to do with “PPC Service” and carry on.

However, what if you are in the on-line business providing zone? Would you not rub your eyes and get blatantly surprised? You’ll wonder how it could be possible. You would go back and refresh the page, might be several times, and if still you see the Pocket PC Services as a result for PPC services, you certainly would lose faith in the business abilities of the unerring search magnum.

How can Google, the leader in PPC business not understand the impact of losing the search by one competitor, and in this case not even a competitor?
How can the ruler of SEM allow one’s quality score to get affected by such an outrageous activity?

How can the LSA fail like this? Anyone endowed with the technological reasoning would understand that the algorithm can never err. It would under no circumstances deviate like this.

So, is the crawler crawling wrong limbs or is it one more of Google’s evil designs???

What are paid links?

On a web page, link that links your click to buying or selling a product or service is a paid link. These links take you to altogether different site or page. So the paid links are like advertisements that we often come across in a publication. It is up to you to follow or ignore them.

Then, what’s the problem?

Paid links on web pages has always been the bone of contention between website owners and search engine optimizers. More links to your page or site was looked upon as a mark of reputation and believability.

However, recently, paid links pertaining to buying and selling are making their entry through some search engine operators. It is believed that search engines are unable to differentiate between general links and paid links; thereby raising serious questions about link based ranking of sites. Surprisingly, these links are passing PageRank by Google. They confirm that all paid links do not violate guidelines set by webmaster. These links generally do not have malicious intentions and help only to spread the business.

What’s the solution?

Solution is still nowhere in sight. Search engines fail to differentiate between general and paid links. Google, the best of them is studying the link architecture and trying to device software that automatically detects paid links. Presently, Google is actively asking its users to report paid links.

Reporting paid links on Google

Google has guidelines for reporting Paid Links. It says:

• Sign in to Goggle’s webmaster console and use the authenticated spam report form
• Then include the word “paid link” (all one word) in the text area of the spam report.
  • If you use the authenticated form, you’ll need to sign in with a Google Account, but your report will      carry more weight.
  • Use the unauthenticated spam report form and make sure to include the word “paid link” (all one word) in the text area of the spam report.

Are paid links worth?  Thousands of dollars are being pumped in to put one paid link at the site or page where it matters. It is expected to generate enormous traffic for the destination site. All it comes down to is link’s conversion rate that could give return on investment. Search engine optimizers are looking for methods to track pages and build links from the websites or pages that don’t cost you heavens.

Users must understand that buying/selling links is a high risk activity. There are ways to reduce it but the risk cannot vanish altogether. Most of the standard and reputed websites no longer display paid links to their clients. Other than ethical or moral grounds, the risk involved discourages them to do so. The reputation of the site is at stake in doing so and it will rank lower in search result pages.

Cross Linking or Internal Link Architecture

This refers to how we are managing to interlink various pages within our own web-site. Wikipedia is a good live example of how Cross Linking or Internal Link Architecture can be effectively and efficiently utilized.

• This is the key to enable the visitor to quickly and easily navigate to the desired content & topics on the web-site. This is easy to create when we are starting a new web-site, provided we have a map charted at the start.
• If it is an existing web-site, it would only require some old-fashioned patch-work, editing a couple of words on different pages for including these links.
• The idea is to inter-connect various contents of our site making relative sense. The search engines also appreciate this kind of an architecture where you show a commitment to the user’s experience. Another way for increasing page views from users.
• Contain this cross linking to relative pages, and do not use these for promotion. Also use them moderately, and do not over link pages, from one to almost every other; since you’d only be destroying the very purpose you desired. Your purpose is to help the user, and not build an internal link – spam.
• There will be links between a page, to another within any given web-site. The Internal Link Architecture of any site enables cross linking take up a required size. Navigational links take up the other half – however, both are equally important for the success of any web-site. Navigation helps organize content into logical groups, enabling our users find out all the content on our web-site.
• Although many forms of navigational links are available, and can be utilized. But the best bet for SEO purposes remains the conservative & old plain text links.
• Linked Images are selectively used by many web-sites. You click on an image or a button, to go to another page or section. These images better be nice, perfectly blending with the design, and when optimized for size – be fast to load. Image links wont pass the same value to a page as the text link, but out-weighs by the look and feel images are able to give to any web-site. However when using these, make sure to enter the fight info for the attribute tags.
• These would not be of any help with the SEO point of view, as crawlers still don’t have the ability to follow linked images, it is best left for the larger sites that have plenty of content groups, They make it simpler for the user to find out what he wants, although some tweaking may be necessary to make sure that they work as expected on browsing platforms. Considering the Crawler’s limitations, it is very important to have well laid out, and easy to access site-map.

But, as the web is moving towards a higher bandwidth era and a more multi-media content - capable of being consumed and distributed – the data collection task has to be performed by multiple crawlers. Google utilizes a suit of crawlers for its ‘Universal Search’ …. The Graphics below gives a family picture of the Google crawlers.