Some time ago, Google took a hard stance against link sales; after all, such behavior was diluting the quality of their search results by favoring those who could afford the often high price of renting/buying links.
By penalizing sites which sold links while simultaneously pocketing cash from their own link sales via Adwords, Google attracted a lot of criticism from SEOs for their hypocritical behavior. That being said, in the eyes of some, Google’s move was a good one… as now the playing field no longer favored the wealthy, right?
Wrong.
Enter the “content creation specialist”, either a cheap freelancer or script-kiddie aided by content scrapers and automated article rewriters. Both specialize in creating large volumes of “original” content plastered with strategically-worded links. End result? Crappy, but unpenalized, content that links to… you guessed it, the rich guy’s website who can afford to hire these cheap hacks in large volume.
And people wonder why there are so many “spam” sites on the internet… by directly penalizing the direct sale of backlinks, Google did not solve “the problem”. They merely obfuscated the process of turning money into linkjuice by inserting a middleman: the content creation specialist. From an economic perspective, I honestly don’t think that the cost of link juice has changed all that much…
Yet more evidence of the fact that the denizens of an economy will innovate and substitute their way around the crude barriers imposed by governments or absurdly powerful entities (such as Google). As is often the case with such events, ultimately nothing has changed, we’ve just exchanged one set of “problems” for another.