Are you (unknowingly or otherwise) violating Google's Webmaster Guidelines (think JC PenneyGate)?
Perry recently made an interesting and insightful comment (although I can't recall exactly where) about the difference between "free" traffic (from natural organic rankings as a result of getting SEO efforts right) and the ability to buy traffic on demand.
He said (paraphrasing) that "free traffic is a house built on quicksand – it's not going to last because the rules keep changing"…
The recent Panda update reiterates how true that is.
Google is constantly evolving Search, and this recent Webmaster Central post reminds us of some critically important things to focus on, namely
- Conversion rate
- Bounce rate
- Clickthrough rate (CTR)
(All three of those apply equally to your AdWords traffic, and performance, as well as Organic rankings).
But I was also very interested to see this last statement:
Buying or selling links for the purpose of passing PageRank violates our Webmaster Guidelines and is very likely to have negative consequences for your website…
I've always instinctively felt that link trading for money was profoundly dodgy, so if you're doing it – beware!