You can't buy SEO visibility

Too many think this is how SEO works and they are wrong

Most people that use the Internet don’t know how SEO works. (I have not done a formal survey, but I assume that it is true for at least 51% of the population if not in the high 80s). Too often when I share with someone that my profession is helping companies to create acquisition channels out of organic search, they respond “isn’t that when you fill a page full of words and then pay Google to show up higher for those words?” Essentially, they believe that SEO is an advertising channel where you can pay to play and on top of that, there is an element of shadiness and subterfuge.

When I have the patience to explain I might give a brief explanation about how complex search really is and I might even reference that I published a book that is supposed to give another way of approaching organic search as a channel. However, usually I don’t do that, and I just reply that it is not how it works when you want to do something right.

My response to this question might be a bit too optimistic. Unfortunately, this IS how it has worked to some degree but it shouldn’t. While you should never be able to buy your way to the top of search results, many do or at least try. Fortunately, this is becoming a lot harder to do.

Background

Anyone even remotely involved in marketing knows that there is a vast underworld of sites that buy links from other websites to “game” the Google algorithm. This practice takes advantage of the defining difference that made Google survive the gladiator games against all the other search engines in the early days of the Internet. While the other engines (and there were many) used library science methods to organize and index the expanding web, Google developed an algorithm intended to filter out the sites that just loaded their pages with words. This filter was links and authority of those links (called Page Rank) Other websites giving a link to a target website were voting for the credibility of the target to be visible for the word on that website.

This concept works in academia where authority is granted by those that quote an expert in other academic research. The more credible the research is the more citations it will have. However, academics aren’t marketers and that is the fatal flaw in applying an academic model in an extremely lucrative marketplace. (Search is a marketplace between a buyer – the searcher – and the seller – the website). Instead of earning the links the way it works in academia, marketers just buy them. A failsafe on this should be that true authoritative sites wouldn’t sell links, but again that is an ideal world. I have seen paid links on the most trustworthy government, academic, and media sites.

This reality that is extremely resource intensive to identify at scale has led to much mistrust of Google overall including this tweet from Elon Musk in 2019

this thread on Hacker News,

and recent predictions for Google to disappear with the rise of generative AI.

All is not lost

I am not so bearish on Google’s prospects because I don’t think links in 2023 matter nearly as much as marketers believe they do. For one, for the most extended time, links only had relative authority and not absolute. A link from a very strong website doesn’t make the target website strong for everything under the sun, it is only authoritative on its core topic. For example, while I was at SurveyMonkey we received links from whitehouse.gov. In a perfect SEO world, this would be winning the gold medal; however, we never saw a noticeable impact from the links because while the White House is of course a highly authoritative website, it is not an authority on the topics we wrote about. This was more than five years ago, and I would imagine that the algorithms that understand link graphs have only become more sophisticated.

What should you do?

Stop focusing on backlinks from a pure backlink and authority perspective. Instead, look for links that will drive attention and awareness to your products and services. If this is your focus, you may get some links that also help with authority, but even without that, you are always creating visibility.

Side note: I have worked with some great agencies and resources that do this, and please reach out if I can guide you.

In short, you can’t buy your way to the top of search results, the sites that do spend a lot of money trying to buy their way to the top likely would have seen the same results even without that spend.