Comments on: Any Form of Paid Links = SPAM by Google

By: Mar

Mar — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 19:37:23 +0000

raghavan8in is right. I remember few years ago the link bid directory craze… then google dropped pagerank for all sites run by phplinkbid

By: raghavan8in

raghavan8in — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 04:26:35 +0000

@mark – Agreed, if you have read the content above the SPAM report form it states that in egregious case only they remove the content from the index and in all other case they use the data to improve their ranking and filtering algo. I suppose paid links report will help them to improve their algo by some filtering. In case of actions I only remember the PageRank penalization that too when Google has started considering Paid Links as SPAM nothing much after that.

By: mark rushworth

mark rushworth — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 09:10:10 +0000

ive reported thousands of paid links and google has never imposed any penalties against these sites… its all hogwash!

By: hotspot shield

hotspot shield — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 04:35:51 +0000

Benedict, it is a great post thanks for posting it!

By: raghavan8in

raghavan8in — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 17:41:25 +0000

@saurav – Google might look for some parameters like Paid Links, Sponsored Links, Sponsored Listings etc in the pages to detect through its algorithm apart from webmaster reports. I'm sure still SEOs will rely on paid links to get quality, relevant links since they are no longer free.

By: saurav

saurav — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 06:10:24 +0000

While Google frowns upon paid links, and it should, I don't believe that Google has a fool proof system to detect paid links.

I believe that Google mainly rely on webmasters who report paid links or paid link havens which are public knowledge to detect and penalize paid links. It would be very difficult, if not impossible to detect paid links algorithmically.

I may be completely wrong when I say this but I have seen instance wherein websites that rank high smell of paid links. I know that they are paid links because I have used those resources in the past myself.

Would love to hear your thoughts on this Raghavan.