Can Google Find and Spank your Paid Links?
Posted Wednesday, April 25th, 2007. Filed under Google.
So last week Matt Cutts got the SEO industry a little riled up when he asked people to send him information on who's buying links, and from where. The Fear Uncertainty and Doubt that followed was partially Matt's to blame, but mostly the fault of those who misperceived what's going on.
Sure, Google is trying to "not count" links that are paid for. Websites that are really bad offenders will not be able to pass link juice on to other sites. People can report, and Google can easily find, the "high PageRank" totally pimped out sites and then decide if they want to outright stop the site from passing link value on to the sites that are advertising.
From what I've seen, these sites are probably blocked from passing link juice via a manual Google decision rather than an automated one. I don't think Google is trying to ban entire sites anymore, but rather to algorithmically detect links that might be paid for on any webpage: words like "Paid links," "Sponsors," or "Paid Advertising" followed by a bunch of outbound links might be a flag, as might links in footers and sidebars, lists of links to unrelated places, or "stand alone" links not part of a sentence.
My favorite quote on this whole issue comes from SugarRae: good paid links are undetectable by search engines because these deals are done via emails and personal meetings in ways that aren't obvious to algorithms, so Google is making up for that by enlisting the general public to report guesses about link buying activity.
So what's the penalty if your site is reported? Danny Sullivan wrote a great post about this: the key penalty is that a site might not be allowed to pass PageRank, meaning it can't transmit ranking value to other sites. There's also potentially a more severe penalty of being banned from Google entirely, though this is rarely seen. The more common refinement is that Google might specifically exclude the paid link sections of a page from passing along link value.
Google is constantly evolving and getting smarter at judging what can be trusted. Link trading died, 3-way linking died, and buying huge above-the-radar PR links died. Buying detectable advertising will die too. Think stealth, think ninja links.
Go ahead Google, find those paid links. Find those SEOs who can't keep up with the changes. We get a rise out of it.
Reader Comments
Skitzzo: Even if Google does find and discount many paid links, they won't be able to curb the paid links market. If they don't tell anyone when they catch a seller, that seller will keep selling while unwittingly ripping off their customers of any real value.
Hawaii SEO: You need to be discrete with all of your SEO activities. A master of the craft will make the copy and link SEO undetectable by a human or robot.
Stewart: Detecting paid links just by algorithms won't be that accurate, but if a competitor reports your paid seat, you could be in trouble without even knowing Google has "cherry picked" you.
Jim Boykin: Stewart, when you say "never get better rankings," I disagree, there can be no middle ground. Google's options are basically to shut off a site's PageRank entirely (rare) or to stop the link seller's juice from flowing to the link buyer, which requires either algorithmic or manual detection.
Loading ...