Apparently, the Paid Links session at SES San Jose this week was quite the spectacle. Oh how I wish I could have been right there in the midst of the action while the search engine reps tried in vain to defend their positions against the big, bad SEOs. Luckily, others have done a great job of giving blow-by-blow playbacks.
Of course, the reality is that paid links work, and any good SEO will advise you to stay under the radar whenever possible. The big ad networks will need to do what they can to obfuscate their inventories so that Big Brother cannot detect them. Just today, in fact, one of the ad networks has switched its affiliate links over to an obfuscated system. I'll leave it at that, because even though I'm sure the obfuscation act won't stay a secret, I don't want to be the whistle-blower myself. Regardless of whether or not Big Brother knows about the obfuscation, what they won't be able to do is decipher each link, and that's where the beauty lies.
So the battle royale continues. On with the games! 🙂