Many major SEO firms make it a standard practice to recommend the purchasing of links to their clients. The search engines actively discourage this practice, and do their level best to detect those paid links. Here are 15 things they can use as signals that a link is possibly a paid link:
- Links Labelled as Advertisements: The search engines can scan for nearby text, such as “Advertisement”, “Sponsors”, “Our Partners”, etc.
- Site Wides: Site wide linking is unnatural, and should be a rare part of your link mix (purchased or not). The only exception to this is the interlinking of all the sites owned by your company, but this presumes that the search engine will understand that all of your sites are from your same company. In general, site wides are a serious flag.
- Links are Sold By a Link Agency: Of course, link agencies are knowledgeable about the link detection methods listed here, and do their best to avoid detection with the links they sell.
- Selling Site has Information on How to Buy a Text Link Ad: Search engines can detect sites that provide information on how to advertise with them. This combined with other clues about links being sold on the site could lead to a review of the site selling the ads, and a discounting of the links.
- Relevance of Your Link: It’s a powerful clue if your link is not really that relevant to the page it’s on, or the site it’s on.
- Relevance of Nearby Links: Another clue would be the presence of your link among a group of links that are not tightly themed.
- Advertising Location Type: The search engine can detect when your link is not part of the main content of the page. For example, it appears in the left or right column of a 3 column site, and the main content is in the middle.
- Someone Reports Your Site for Buying Links: Who would do this? Your competitor! If your competitor submits an authenticated spam report to Google, it will get looked at, and acted upon.
- Someone Reports Your Site for Some Other Reason: Perhaps your competitor does not recognize you are buying links, and turns you in for something else. Once this happens, the search engine will take a look at all aspects of your site, not just the reported issue.
- Someone Reports the Site you Bought Links from for Selling Links: A competitor of yours can do this, or a competitor of the site selling links can do this. Once a search engine figures out that a site is selling links, it’s possible that this could trigger a deeper review of the sites that were buying those links.
- Someone Reports the Site you Bought Links from for Some Other Reason: As before, this can lead to the search engine discovering that the site is selling links, even though it was not the core subject of the Spam report filed against it.
- Disgruntled Employee Leaves Your Company, and Reports Your Site: For decades, many companies have had a practice of escorting fired (or laid off) employees out of the building. The reason for this approach is that people get upset when they lose their job. However, even this practice would not prevent such a person from reporting your site in a spam report to a search engine. Even though that may be a violation of the confidentiality agreement you probably have with your employees, you would never know, because there is no transparency in spam reporting.
- Disgruntled Employee Leaves the Agency Your Used, and Reports Your Site: This same scenario can play out with an employee leaving the link agency you used. This form of disgruntled employee can report either your site directly, or the agency itself.
- Disgruntled Employee Leaves the Company of the Site Your Bought Links from, and Reports Your Site: Finally, it can also happen with someone leaving the company you bought the links from. This type of disgruntled employees can report your site, or the site they used to work for.
- Internal Human Review: Last, but not least, the search engine can do a human review. In general, search engines don’t do spontaneous reviews of sites, and wait for things detected algorithmically, or a spam report, to trigger a deeper review. But, you could certainly imagine that search engines could make an overt effort to clean up the search results in portions of their index they perceive to be spammy.
Search Engine Courses of Action
In the case of Google, it is known that one of the basic policies is to punish sites who sell text links by terminating that sites ability to pass link juice. This is essentially a first course of action. Once this is done, Google could look more closely at the selling site, and the purchasing sites for other signs of spammy behavior.
The search engines also take stronger actions at times, such as an algorithmic penalty, or banning a site from their index. I don’t know exactly how those determinations are made, but I believe that there are 3 major triggers for such action:
- It can be the cumulative affect of several signals of poor site quality.
- The search engine determines that a site has bought links on a large scale.
- Upon human review, the search engine detects a clear pattern of an intent to deceive them.
Summary
Plenty of businesses are successful with a link buying strategy. However, the search engines are investing more and more effort into their detection. At STC, our preference is to focus on obtaining links through great content, and making people aware of what we (our clients) have. But we place a very high priority on very high value links.
These are the types of sites that are very difficult to buy links from. For one thing, when these higher profile sites sell links, it does not take that long for it to become public knowledge. Just ask United Press International, who recently promoted the sale of links for improving page rank. UPI has discontinued the practice because of the furor it created.
This also has great synergies with the notion of investing time in developing great content for users. In a world with increasing personalization by the search engines, this is increasingly very, very important, and over time may well have a larger impact on your rankings then the links you get. You can see the search engines shifting from having web sites vote on your site, to having users vote on your site. One way or another, this is coming to a search engine near you.
Hi Peter – you should be OK if you are on a relevant page. Note that many directory sites probably do not pass any link benefit however. For example, if you are in a directory that is a free for all directory, or you pay a fee and you are guaranteed in, those links probably are of no value from an SEO perspective.
[...] 15 Methods for Paid Link Detection [...]
Google can punish people who buy links by ignoring links that were paid for. This is a fair punishment and will prevent businesses from submitting competitors to paid directories. Google can let you pay for links and if it doesn’t help your site it will be hurting your pocket book.
Mhm, I personally don´t buy links because in my business being among the first ten is more than enough, it´s one of the few which are still not very google-dependent, but sometimes I already doubt that paid links are worse than others. It depends. Of course in some small business areas paid links can still give great profit. But why not, this is just capitalism and everybody is free to advertise more or less than a similar competitor. The whole Inform about paid links subject is nonsense in my opinion. It seems to me that Google prefers selling Adlinks but forbidding advertising is very strange and I am sure bound to lose sooner or later. The only problem I see is that paid links are more SEOlike than natural ones, sometimes, but the bigger the Seo scene becomes, the more difficult it will be, Google should see this as technical challenge. Also, it should make no sense to buy a PR 7 link and be done with weak competitors.
[...] Sehr interessanter Artikel für SEOs den ich da gerade entdeckt habe: 15 Methods for Paid Link Detection [...]
I’m not a native english speaker but I think on point 14 it was meant: “Disgruntled Employee Leaves the COMPANY OF the Site You Bought Links from, and Reports Your Site”
Thanks for the article
Hi Dave,
Thanks for pointing out the correction. I adjusted the post.
And how do I prevent to get a link from a bad Site?
Hi Igor,
If you mean, how do you determine if the link you are buying is from a site that does not have the ability to pass link juice, I don’t think there is a clear answer.
[...] Keep in mind that you want to keep any paid links set up in such a way as to avoid detection. That is why this technique works particularly well when creating permanent paid links. Save and Share: [...]
[...] Es stellt sich die Frage, wie genau Google bezahlte Links erkennt. Spekuliert wird in diversen Foren auch darüber, ob Google manuell oder automatisch vorgeht. Ich denke es handelt sich um ein automatisiertes Verfahren, welches nach bestimmten Signalen sucht. Überschreitet die Anzahl der Signale einen definierten Schwellwert, schlägt der Filter zu und es kommt zu einer entsprechenden Herabstufung. Beispiele für solche Signale finden sich unter 15 Methods for Paid Link Detection [...]
Thanks, a very interesting about paid links, i think if someone want to buy a link he has to check the site intensive first and he has to look for the site-relevance.
Overall a nice information buddy…But now, webmasters can buy and sell links through content…which is not an easy task to find out the selling and buying of links by robots too.
While searching on Internet I found your blog so interesting.
I am agree that Google can penalize your site for buying and selling links.
15 methods of Paid link Detection is really good post. That is what I am searching for.
Thanks for that!
Very interesting article and even more interesting responses. I think that agencies that sell text link ads have a right to sell them as advertising. But does not Google have the same right to deny text link ads as a means to gain link popularity? It is their search engine. Has not text link ads been used to “trick” Google in to thinking that the link is from an authoritative site. I prefer to play with in the rules. I know a lot of folks who invested a ton of $$$ in text link ads knowing that the links were not exactly the kind of links Google was looking for. I do not encourage my clients to do it and haven’t since 2006. It was not worth the risk.
Good information for byuing links. But what about blogroll, as it will be just like sitewide links. But many blogs use these type of linking always. Do they also be discounted by search engines? Please clarify.
Peterson – blogroll links are pretty easily recognized as a blogroll by search engines, so I would not expect this to lead to a flag by the search engine, unless you have a really unusual implementation (for example, non-standard software).
Just be aware that 10 links from one domain is not nearly as good as 1 link from 10 domains. In general, multiple links from one domain begins to offer a diminishing level of return.
Sigh, nothing but more FUD and empty speculative drivel from self-styled SEO “experts”.
Fact: *No one* really knows how search engines operate apart from the search engine programmers themselves and those who truly know and understand which algorithms they have chosen to deploy.
A sleazy field to start with, SEO has further degenerated into a circus of pretenders (heck, it’s pretty obvious that Matt Cutts is one of these, with those who slavishly follow his every blog entry being even more laughable) promoting one “superstitious” belief after another.
What a comically depressing state of affaris.
Hi Jenny – It’s truly a shame that you view this as FUD and consider SEO a sleazy field. Quite honestly, I have nothing to say to you, other than sweeping generalizations about the behavior of groups of people is always bad.
The other thing that I could ask of course, is given your belief, why are you spending so much time on SEO blogs?
Don’t buy links…………….its all about quality anyway! Build strategic relationships and partnerships by capitalizing on your clients relationships. I’ve attained high ranking for many, many clients by following this practice.
Thanks for your comments.
Thanks for the insight. I’ve already made some changes as I was reading this article to one of the websites that I’ve been working on for a friend.
Thank you for ur Valuable information. it will help us.
Valuable Ideas – (Tips)
Thank you.
Wow!.. Nice list. This is a valuable blog to read and learn lot of things. Thanks for sharing.
This is good stuff, finally somebody with some sense. Thanks for the great article! Some of the comments on here are laughable. If you buy links, you deserve to get caught. If it’s paid advertising add “no-follow”. Easy. Google sends a lot of traffic to sites, you going to argue with it?
Thank you, great post!
“Links are Sold By a Link Agency: Of course, link agencies are knowledgeable about the link detection methods listed here, and do their best to avoid detection with the links they sell.”