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What if the only thing you had to
do in order to achieve high search engine rankings was plunk
down enough cash and buy your way to the top? Would this
be an unfair advantage of the big guy over the little guy?
Well, this is
what is happening right now within the search engine community.
With many search engines going pay-per-click (PPC), all
of a sudden having a highly relevant and highly optimized
website is not important. A person of company with enough
money can bid for the highest ranking positions in the search
engine listings.
Where does this
leave highly relevant, but cash-poor sites? Buried. What
does this mean to the consumer who is looking for a product,
service or information? Most likely this will mean more
frustrating searches as all of the commercial sites are
upfront in the listings. Also, this may mean that some visitors
may abandon the PPC search engines altogether in favors
of SE's that offer more relevant search results.
Google still
has limited their commercial listings to the very top and
right side of the screen. In the left middle of Google,
the commercial and non-commercial sites compete for the
top spots for a particular keyword search. But even Google
is affected by the "pay for top ranking" phenomenon,
when it comes to giving a large degree of weight to a website's
inbound links.
Now if a site
is engaged in reciprocal linking with a large amount of
both inbound and outbound links, then this is not a problem.
The problem arises when a company with deep pockets pays
for inbound links from a handful of highly relevant sites
and achieves a high ranking with this method. This creates
an unfair playing field in which people and individuals
with smaller budgets cannot compete and thus are buried
deeper in the listings, meaning fewer visitors and less
sales.
So, in this
scenario, a system is setup where the rich get richer and
the poor get poorer. The solution is not an obvious one.
Perhaps a different and more equitable weighting in the
algorithm for inbound and outbound links would help, but
this will not be a perfect solution, either. Anyway, this
is one area to keep an eye on as the search engines will
eventually need to deal with and come up with an equitable
solution for this problem.
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