Editorial Links Are Sacred To Google

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The way Google treats incoming links lately has been under debate. They’ve made a number of rumblings lately about vague “webmaster directives” concerning the no-follow meta tag, paid links, and the sort. Google, has stated over and over the sacredness of an “editorially given” link, and I’m not sure why that is, or how they can even figure out how a link was obtained. Sure, they can guess, but not with any certainty.

More importantly, why build their entire foundation on link popularity, but then get too cute about what “links count”? Worse, people are actually scared to get “too many links” or the wrong kind. Man, you need links…especially if you ever lose your Google traffic. To imagine that people are actually falling for this sort of brainwashing is unreal. If Google dumps you from their search engine, the only way you can get any traffic is from people who know your domain name already, or from people who come in on links.

Links that bring direct traffic are the single greatest form of traffic development you can get, so it’s awfully presumptious to levy penalties for buying text link advertising, regardless of what the company may think of the practice. No way will companies stop purchasing text links or anything else, because if they did, they’re literally shooting themselves in the foot.

So why is Google so excited about “editorially given” links anyway? I can’t tell you. They don’t use “editors” to make most of their ranking decisions, so it seems like a peculiar term for them to get stuck on.

We’ll see how much things actually change in the next few months. I’m tempted to think that most webmasters are not rushing to make changes to their websites without actually policy changes from Google. Time will tell how it will all pan out.

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