Something different - Revenue model of the Future?

[cabbie]

While most of you are begging for, and heavens forbid, even paying for links (rofl), I get so many unsolicited links every day that my page rank is off the chart.
Now, I am more used to lurking in shadows, than being under the spotlight and I am feeling a bit uncomfortable.
Sure I get a kick at looking at the green bar, and it's something to tell and impress my friends, but as Donkey says" I aint got no friends".
And the thing is, these links aren't making me rich.

So I am trying to come up with a angle so something is in it for me.
And I have come up with a idea of charging the websites that link to my websites $5 each for the privilege.
What do You think?
A cool Million would be nice.

So while you are begging them, I am fighting them and making them pay or I will threaten to disavow their links!

This should be the revenue model of the future and Google should encourage it.

What could be a better recommendation that someone actually pays to link to you!
Page Rank, will become Paid Rank and the site with the most number of paid links to it wins!
As well as the attribute of No follow, we will have "Paid for" which Google will credit both the site paying and the site receiving.
So guys start expecting a email from me soon asking you to pay me 5 bucks or else.

[canuckseo]

Ok I'll bite

let's say I link to you, and you disavow my link. How does that negatively impact me?

Granted if enough sites that i linked to were to disavow my links it would have an impact, but if 1 site disavows this won't have any negative impact on me.

[cabbie]

For saving $5 you want to take a chance that a authority site(remember why you linked to it) disavows your link?
Don't forget that Google already rewards for outbound linking to good sites.
You lose that benefit as well.

[FranticFish]

Say I link to your home page and you don't want me to, what do you do? You can't STOP me linking to you - there is a legal precedent in at least one jurisdiction that no permission need be sought to link to any site.

You can disavow the link in WMT but beyond that you have no other course of action.

[SnowMan68]

I think most people would ignore your request and link to some of the other authority sites without an issue.

[cabbie]

"You can disavow the link in WMT but beyond that you have no other course of action. "

You are right but that maybe enough to convince the website owner to send me a token amount of $5 to verify his link as valid.
You mention precedence.
A new legal suit maybe interesting, now that Google have admitted unauthorised links to a website may harm it.
Links to my site may be harmful, and I don't have the resources to verify the bona fides of every page that links to me.

"I think most people would ignore your request and link to some of the other authority sites without an issue."

Sure, but remember they chose to link to mine for a reason.
What is more hassle for them? Find another site as a resource and change the link and potentially get the same problem or just cough up $5 and be done with it?

[LifeinAsia]

What is more hassle for them? Find another site as a resource and change the link and potentially get the same problem or just cough up $5 and be done with it?

For me, paying the $5 "extortion fee" would be the bigger hassle. Much easier for me to just remove the link to your site.

[canuckseo]

Much easier for me to just remove the link to your site.

agree

[topr8]

... right now i'd just remove the link and link elsewhere - and i do run a few of the kind of sites that link out a lot - not because i care about having a few links disavowed (quite honestly most webmasters don't even know what that is) but because receiving an email like that would put the hackles on my back up.

which isn't to say that if enough people did it the whole landscape would change, then i'd rethink.

however $5 dollars is a lot, when i write a researched article (which isn't every day) i could easily have 10+ outgoing links as references or further reading, there is no way i'd pay $50 just to publish an article on my own site!

[cabbie]

My letter wouldn't be threatening.
Maybe it would go something like this

Dear Sir/Madame,
It has come to our attention that your website www.somebusiness. has link out to our website www.thebestinitsfield.
We welcome such links from high quality and respected websites such as yours.
In our endeavour to provide the best resource in our field, we routinely screen the websites that use our resource as a reference, because Google has a policy( a link here to Google's blog about disavow links) of penalising sites that are seen to have low quality links to it.Google suspects those low quality links to be bought by the website that they are linking to and thus outside their guidelines to successful ranking.
A website such as ours attracts many new links daily and to protect our integrity, which is in your interest and ours, we have come up with a system where quality sites such as yours who link to us, pay a token price of $5 paypal to verify that your link to www.thebestinitsfield is valid.
In this way, we protect both the integrity of your website and ours.
Our paypal address is pay-or-disavow@thebestinitsfield. Please contact us if you have any enquiries.


What do you think?:)

[LifeinAsia]

We welcome such links from high quality and respected websites such as yours ... penalising sites that are seen to have low quality links to it

In other words, "If you pay us $5, we will consider your site to be high quality. otherwise, we will consider it low quality and 'report' to Google as such."

I previously said the easier way would be to remove any links to the site that sent such a message. More likely, I would add a bit of hassle and forward the message to Google.

I'm sure others would take it a step further and report it to the police as an extortion attempt.

And some might even argue that the message crosses state lines and advocate bringing the Feds into the fray.

What do you think?:)

I think it would be very entertaining to read about. :)

[bwnbwn]

cabbie I think you have been up to long. Have heard it all now.

[jimbeetle]

So while you are begging them, I am fighting them and making them pay or I will threaten to disavow their links!

And why exactly are folks supposed to see this a threat?

[johnhh]

I'd say 'no you send me $5 for all the traffic I send you'

It will never work because of that, you could be killing your traffic ! and shooting yourself in the foot.

Sounds too much like a scam.

[johnhh]

added .. however I am considering a members only area - charge $5 as a once off fee for special features.

[cabbie]

I think perhaps, members here are looking at this idea from the perspective of a webmaster who has worked hard to get links for their website.
The idea that you would be asked to pay to link to another website is diabolical, when your experience is exactly the opposite.
The value is the other way, in your thinking.
But,I disagree.
Many websites are owned by businesses, big and small.
If they link out to my website, it's because the link has value to them.They are not linking to help me.
As I have explained, links to my site may harm me.
Sure, some may help with traffic and exposure but that in turn costs me bandwidth and money.:(
If my site is attracting 50,000 link every 3 months, then there is a good chance that they may cause harm.
Google's page rank has gone down in this last update to 9.
What has happened? My website has gone up to 9.
I am worried.
Search Google for the kws 'search engines' and they are not on the first page.
Why is this?
Perhaps too many low quality links? ;)

Its time to change to a honest model of internetting.
If you want to link out to a website, then be willing to pay, I say.

[Samizdata]

Google have admitted unauthorised links to a website may harm it

No harm is done to a website by links, whether "authorised" or not.

Google's ranking system may be affected, but that is not the same thing at all.

Google != the web.

...

[FranticFish]

Google have admitted unauthorised links to a website may harm it

Not quite: they've admitted that 'poor quality' links may do harm. [ADDED and this is a very tacit admission]

The legal precedent you'd need to set therefore would be proving in court that my link has a chance of harming your site; and in a criminal court then that standard is 'beyond reasonable doubt'.

If you wanted to bring such a case based on your fears of my harming your website, you might then have a case - based solely on the merits of my site.

But if you're asking for money to overlook the merits of my site, then I think you'd have a non-starter. You're so concerned that $5 would put your mind at rest? You'd be laughed out of court.

[incrediBILL]

I'm going to jump in here and coin the term for this new SEO linking methodology:
Blackmail SEO

[netmeg]

Go ahead and try it, and see how far you get.

[lorax]

I'm with netmeg. Try it and report back. Till then it's a theory we can argue over all day.

[Samizdata]

Go ahead and try it, and see how far you get.

I wouldn't underestimate the amount of paranoia and stupidity out there, and as the old saying goes "A fool and his money are soon parted" - he may well make a few bucks.

But it really is a false premise - links do not "harm" a website in any way.

Webmasters will naturally be unhappy if they see reduced Google traffic, but they have no entitlement to that traffic and their website will remain exactly as it was (unharmed).

The only actual "harm" would be to Google's reputation, assuming that their algorithms could be shown to be so easily manipulated (as they have been in the past).

If there is a problem with Google's system, it is up to that company to fix it.

Otherwise people will lose confidence and go elsewhere.

And rightly so.

...

[martinibuster]

If a site provides a valuable resource, in the form of free images, software, widget, app, templates, something highly useful, is it blackmail to ask those linking to the free resources to help support the site by contributing a donation?

Is it blackmail to ask for a donation of support from those encouraging others to freeload off the site they're linking to?

[jimbeetle]

cabbie, you haven't answered my question from above:

So while you are begging them, I am fighting them and making them pay or I will threaten to disavow their links!

And why exactly are folks supposed to see this a threat?

[incrediBILL]

is it blackmail to ask those linking ...

It is if failure to comply results in a disavow links report

FWIW, webmasters have already attempted to use the Google WMT URL removal to attempt to remove pages from one of my sites but of course they failed because my robots.txt didn't reflect the removal request. I don't know if WMTs still allows you to request removal of any URL outside of your domain, I was shocked that it did, but at least there were safeguards to avoid the attempted abuse.

Even if the URLs couldn't be removed, there are a limited number of requests allowed and I don't know if requests I didn't make went against my total, so that's a possible vulnerability waiting to be abused.

If they will try to abuse the URL removal tool, I have no doubt that the disavow link tool will be abused.

[dvduval]

What bothers me is a Pakistani hacker group has a huge million dollar operation hacking into big sites like Creative Commons, American Legion and lots of Pagerank 8, 9 and even 10 sites and then reselling that pagerank. They are making literally millions of dollars off of unsuspecting small businesses that believe google or their SEO consultants when they tell them that a site with higher pagerank will tend to appear higher in the search results.

This has wreaked havoc on the directory industry as the black hats selling pagerank totally dominate right now. Then the honest people trying to run a well edited directory are pushed to the sidelines as businesses choose to submit their listings to the black hats. Of course these sites won't keep their pagerank, but the visible toolbar rank will be there for many months and they will reap great rewards.

If you run a directory, it is increasingly difficult to say you can make money honestly. Google makes it all possible by showing pagerank gained from hacking into sites or paying for links.

I could easily document 100 sites RIGHT NOW that are hacked and the owner doesn't know, and 100s more that are paid. I am talking about PR 7+ sites. If I can do this so easily, why is google so inept?

And of course, there have been tons of reports.

[Dymero]

I don't get this. So, in your mind, paying $5 means the site is quality? What if it's stuffing keywords, over-optimizing, or has a bad backlink profile of its own?

This is paranoia. If someone is so determined to knock you down in the rankings by employing negative SEO against you, they'll probably just set up another site to do it (or hack one), rather than paying you the $5.

[cabbie]

More likely, I would add a bit of hassle and forward the message to Google.

Don't worry Google are first on my mailing list.

And why exactly are folks supposed to see this a threat?

Well,I wont really be threatening to disavow links.I may include a link to google's blog about disavow links[googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com ]
And, yes, disavow links will probably not harm their websites anyway...but who knows.

But webmasters should all be on my side.
Most here are taking the angle that you would be losing money in this model :)
Wouldn't you like to get paid for people linking to you?
As MartiniBuster says, whats wrong with asking for a donation to keep the resource upto date and valuable?

BTW, my proposed letter and paypal address was a bit tongue in cheek.I agree some fine tuning needs doing on my letter.
I will probably outsource that to MartiniBuster. :)

[oddsod]

cabbie, brilliant idea!

Ignore the nay sayers, many of them are steeped in the culture of buying/selling links and in the SEO tactics of the past. While I know some webmasters here are big players, many may not be owners of the type of authority sites that could pull off this charge and can't therefore quite get their heads around the argument you make.

Terming it Blackmail SEO is a uncalled for, this is simply business. It takes time / technology to verify a linking website and charging for that is no different to, for example, Yahoo charging to evaluate your site before adding it to their directory (nobody complained about that at the time).

And why exactly are folks supposed to see this a threat?

Because having an authority site disavow your links is a slur on your site. People normally disallow links only from spammy, worthless sites and when an authority site says, effectively, that you're spammy and worthless, the Gorg might just believe them without phoning you to have a chat first. For those who are willing to take the chance, there's no problem here. It's the others who'll weigh up the potential negative effects against the token $5.

cabbie, collect a few examples of sites that didn't cough up and ended up tanking in the SERPS a few weeks/months later! :)

[treeline]

If I send you $10 can I choose the link text I use to link to your page?