The impact of Googles Fear, Uncertainity and Doubt Strategy against SEO's over paid links has started to come back and bite them.

The problem is that since going public they have started to morph in M$ but without the experience or knowledge to pull off a large scale FUD campaign and end up benefiting.

When M$ created FUD around products the end result was that people standarised on there products as a defensive mechanism to avoid the potential issues that they did not understand.

Most business people will over compensate in areas that they dont understand and look for a nice simple clean answer that removes the FUD without them having to dig into it and waste lots of time.

This is exactly what people have started to do now over the paid links debacle. Google has said that paid links will be detected and the sites involved will be penalised, but no one knows how they are detecting them and they cant tell us. I know Matt Cutts will tell us that there very good and dont make mistakes but we all know they get it wrong all the time, and when its someones lively hood at risk, people will always just avoid the risk if theres no benefit to them.

The end result is that for a normal business person, they have no idea how google works out whats a paid link or not, which leaves them with only two practical solutions that dont involve them becoming an SEO:

1) Dont create links

2) NoFollow everything

Both of these options are bad for google and other search engines but in reality the only practical solutions for small business who cant take the chance that goolge will get it wrong and thing that they are selling links when they are clearly not.

In the last two weeks I have had three instances where people have told me they installed a nofollow module to avoid any issue, two were experienced bloggers (both of whom pretty much dominate there niche purely based on the quality of there content + a well seo'd site)and one was a small web development company who now installs the drupal nofollow module as standard on new installs and has added nofollow to all all outbound links for all there 30 clients.

 

From an SEO Strategy point of view this could prove interesting as the mass propagation of nofollow would actually force google to actually add more weight to nofollow links which has all sorts of implications.