With the “Are paid links evil” session at the San Jose SES in sight, it seems like the buying-links-discussion has started all over again during the past few weeks. Rand and Aaron both published great articles about buying links and the discussion seams to get hot again in other places -and in other languages- as well.

Last week’s SESSJ session has already been covered in a few places (thanks for that, those recaps are really useful for us home stayers), which should get this thing heated up again. I guess that, because buying links as a link building strategy still works, this discussion will remain to go on for a while. Great, I love this discussion, so there will be a lot of new blog posts about paid links during the next few weeks

Here’s something about paid links to think about:
- If link purchases have a positive ROI for a company, they’ll continue to make them. If they have a positive ROI, chances are good that they must also be serving the searcher effectively and thus, be good results for the engines. (Todd Friesen)
- Link Baiting, what Google’s suggest as link building strategy, is as egregious if not worse for relevancy than paid links - viral content of such an off-topic nature should not help your rankings and is more “polluting” than relevant paid links. (Greg Boser)
- Google often uses the example of the Yahoo! Directory as a place where paid links are acceptable, because these links get an ‘editorial review’. However, not only is Yahoo!’s directory filled with spammy sites, but the $299 reviewing fee is a recurring fee. What kind of editor needs an annual fee of almost 300 bucks to review a website?
- Matt Cutts states that the FTC has said that word of mouth marketing is like any other kind of marketing, and if you’re being paid to say something, you should disclose this to both people and machines. Do regular ads have hidden disclosure messages for the Yellow Pages? Should I disclose that the link has been disclosed to search engines as well?

And I really love Michael Gray’s theory about paid links & Google (copy/ pasted from SEOmoz):

• Both commercial and non-commercial queries exist on the web;

• Commercial websites are NOT generally linked-to naturally;

• Non-commercial websites are much more likely to entice natural links;

• By eliminating paid links, Google will fill the top results for commercial queries with primarily non-commercial results;

• Thus, when a searcher wishes to take a commercial action, the only relevant results will be the paid listings;

• And, thus, searchers will be more likely to click on AdWords links, which earns Google money.

Not that I think that this theory is the truth, but it is a nice point of view.

There is enough info available about how and why to use LinkedIn and how you can add links to your profile. But why would you neglect optimizing your profile links, by leaving out the anchor text?

Recently, I came across two profiles with links that didn’t have one of the standard LinkedIn anchor texts, but also dind’t have a “polluted” anchor text. This means no company names, high competitive keywords or common anchor texts. In both cases it were links with a (pretty) unique anchortext.

Here’s Michael Gray’s profile. There are three links listed in his profile. Two of Graywolf’s links aren’t anchor text optimized (the ‘My Company’ and ‘My Blog’ links) and one has a customized anchor text (Central Hub Website). Now check out Google’s search results.

Example number two is Peter vd Graaf’s profile. Peter has also optimized one of his three links; the link to his SEO workshop page has an optimized anchor text (not anymore; see comments). If you check the Google search results, you’ll notice that this page also ranking quite high (please note that the page’s language is Dutch, so I had to adjust the query language a bit).

In both cases, the anchor text used has no occurances on the page. I guess this is LinkedIn Google Bombing

Want to use these powerful links more efficiently? Edit the links in your profile.

In stead of filing your links under “My Blog” or “My Company”, you can file them under “Other”. Other means anchor text.

Fill in the anchor text of your choice and save the settings. Link back to your LinkedIn profile to get the links indexed (if it isn’t indexed yet) and you just received three powerful links.